The Frontal Polymerization Method in High Technology Applications

Abstract

The method of frontal polymerization (FP) has been presented repeatedly in different publications but, taking into account the aim of this review, we intend to focus detailed and oriented attention on the process specificity that causes its unexpected advantages. This work has disclosed the ways to detect, reveal, and investigate the foundations of the frontal polymerization method and their use in different areas of science and technology. As researchers gain closer insight into this nontypical method of polymerization, they reveal new advantages and possibilities for its use to solve many problems both in the synthesis of polymer nanocomposites with retention of nanoscale dimensions, uniform distribution, and the optimal number of nanoparticles and in the synthesis of intercalated polymeric high-temperature superconductors, multifunctional gradient materials, hydrogels with prescribed properties, and other materials. It has been shown that the models and revealed features for the transition of linear autowaves into nonlinear ones are of interest and can be used similarly to the autowave processes that occur by the Belousov–Zhabotinsky mechanism in biology and human organism. With allowance for that noted above, this paper also describes the kinetic features of frontal polymerization that cause us to reconsider certain approaches and principles of formal kinetics. The ways and methods to pass from formal (isothermal) kinetics to nonisothermal kinetics (by the example of adiabatic polymerization) with finding the new principles of kinetic computations under nonisothermal conditions in application to frontal polymerization are given.