Applicability to Other Polymers

The concept to adopt the electrostatic repulsive force as a driving force for a photostimulated expansion of the polymer chain is useful and widely applicable to other polymer systems. Polystyrene and polyacrylamide having pendant leucohydroxide and leuco-cyanide groups were found to change their solution viscosity in methylene chloride and in water, respectively. 

The application of widespread standard polymer processing techniques to the formation of colloidal crystals was introduced by Ruhl et al. [60]. They demonstrated the fabrication of a large colloidal crystal film, which comprises core-shell latex particles. Upon coagulation the soft shell of the particles causes the formation of a rubbery mass, which can be uniaxially compressed. The radial horizontal flow during the compression induces crystallization of the particles from the surface of the plates inward. The soft shell constitutes the matrix in which the hard spheres are embedded. This technique is promising for efficient application to other polymer processing methods like extrusion or injection molding. 

With the exception of the work reported on polyolefins, the applications described above have involved polystyrene samples. The reason for this restricted initial scope is that thermal FFF has evolved primarily in an academic setting where the availability of a wide range of narrow polystyrene standards was considered indispensable to the evolution and refinement of the mechanism and behaviour of thermal FFF systems. However, as thermal FFF increasingly enters the industrial laboratory, its applicability to other polymers becomes crucially important. Fortunately, we have done enough work with other polymer systems to understand the general behaviour of various polymer classes in thermal FFF systems. 

In this section, our recent investigation of LPE by solid-state NMR has been briefly reviewed. Through these studies solid-state NMR has been found to be very useful to studying the crystalline structure of polymers. Although we have been concerned only with LPE of very simple chemical structure, by use of different magnetic relaxation phenomena the developed spectroscopic technique will be applicable to other polymers of complex chemical structure. 

Fibre bonding High porosity of scaffold Limit of application to other polymers... 

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