Solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance polymeric material

In the past decades, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has been used extensively to study various aspects of polymer chemistry and engineering. Fig. 1 shows the relationship among polymerization conditions, polymer structure, and the material s physical structure and end uses. Solution, solid state, and imaging NMR techniques contribute to imderstanding the physical and chemical aspects of the route from raw materials to final product. Solution NMR provides information about all aspects of the polymerization reactions and the final structure of the synthesized polymer. This information can be correlated with the material s final properties and provide feedback to control the initial polymerization process so that the fraction of structures responsible for desirable properties can be controlled in a systematic way. 

Rather soon after the nuclear magnetic reasonance (NMR) method was applied successfully to solid state physics, NMR was applied to the study of physical properties of polymers. To the best of our knowledge, a short paper by Wilson and Pake published in 1952 on the two-component structure of the proton NMR spectrum of polyethylene was the first paper in the field of NMR application to polymer science After that, many papers of NMR studies in polymer physics were published and many novel informations concerning molecular motions and structures of polymeric materials were presented. Recent advances in hardware of instrumentation of NMR measurement opened its application even to the medical and tomographic field Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR or ESR), on the other hand, was applied to polymer science in the middle of the 1950s in the studies of polymerization and irradiation effects and its application to molecular motion study was established in the first half of the 1960s. 

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