Accidental discovery leads to new class of plastics
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.027934
BBC : Thermosetting plastics are polymers that, once formed into a shape, can’t be reshaped by heating them. Jeanette Garcia of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, created one of these plastics by accident when she left a component out of a reaction and found a solid plastic stuck in her flask that she could remove only by breaking the glass. Because the reagents she had used were simple, she was surprised to find that there was no previous research on the plastic that had formed. Garcia’s examination of the plastic revealed that it had one characteristic that no other thermoset was known to have: It could be dissolved by acid into its component chemicals. The reusability of the components makes the plastic valuable for its recyclability; other thermosets can only be discarded when they break or are no longer usable.
