Even though we’ve been benefiting from plastics for almost 100 years, there’s still an awful lot of research activity taking place. In addition to the continual development of new plastic materials with a host of impressive properties, including electrical conductivity and shape memory, researchers are busy tailoring existing plastic materials for new applications, modifying them with other materials, and producing them from alternative feedstock.

Indeed, if anything, this research activity seems to be proliferating both in industry and in academia, and increasingly in both at the same time. For a start, major plastics producers are hard at work establishing research centers around the world. Many of these producers are historically based in Europe or the USA, and they used to conduct the majority of their research in their home regions. But this is beginning to change.

In March 2014, German company Bayer MaterialScience opened a new coatings, adhesives, and specialities laboratory in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, following the expansion of its Polymer Research & Development Center (PRDC) in Shanghai, China, which was completed in 2013. This expansion turned the PRDC into the third of Bayer’s main innovation centers, joining facilities in Leverkusen, Germany, and Pittsburgh, USA. The company also has smaller R&D centers in Brazil, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and India.

Fellow German company Wacker has also recently expanded three of its Asian technical centers in Singapore, South Korea, and India. The company expanded the Singapore technical center so that it could provide technical support to customers in the consumer and personal care, paper coating, and plastics processing industries. This will involve staff at the center testing and developing polymer powders and dispersions, silicone emulsions and resins, and antifoam agents for customers throughout Southeast Asia. 

The expanded technical center in Kolkata, India, will work on developing new silicone products and applications for customers in the personal care, textile, automotive, and construction sectors. The technical center in Seoul, South Korea, will focus on developing silicone products for the electronics industry, and dispersible polymer powders and dispersions for the construction industry.

This trend of establishing research centers worldwide is also extending to companies headquartered outside of Europe and the USA. At the end of 2013, Saudi Arabian company SABIC established $100 million technology centers in Bengaluru, India, and Shanghai, adding to its 17 other technology centers in Saudi Arabia, the USA, the Netherlands, Spain, Japan, and South Korea.

Academic/Industrial Colocations

Other companies are setting up research centers in new regions in conjunction with academic organizations in those regions. Over the past few years, Belgian company Solvay has added three new Research, Development and Technology (RD&T) centers in India, Korea, and China to its existing network of eleven centers in Europe, the USA, and Brazil. The €13 million Korean center is being set up with the Ewha Womans University in Seoul and will be based on its campus, allowing Solvay to collaborate with Ewha’s Institute of Nano-Biotechnology, Centre for Intelligent Nano-biomaterials, and New & Renewable Energy Research Centre.

German company BASF is taking a similar approach. Historically, the majority of its research activity has taken place in Germany, but by 2020 it reportedly wants 50% of its research activities to take place outside of Europe, with 25% taking place in Asia-Pacific. To this end, BASF has recently established six new laboratories in Asia and the USA, bringing the share of its research activities conducted outside of Europe up to 28%.

In addition, BASF has recently established several regional networks for materials research with academic organizations. In March 2014, it launched the Network for Advanced Materials Open Research (NAO) with Beijing University of Chemical Technology, the Beijing Institute of Technology, the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Fudan University, and Tsinghua University, all in China, plus Hanyang University in South Korea and Kyoto University in Japan. 

Through the network, these organizations will work with BASF on developing new materials, including plastics, for use in the automotive, construction, detergent, water, and wind industries. Current research projects include developing a modeling tool to predict the aging properties of composite materials used by the wind industry, and novel coating systems based on hybrid materials.

BASF has already established similar materials research networks in Europe and the USA, with the aim of developing novel polymers and biopolymers. The Joint Research Network on Advanced Materials and Systems (JONAS) brings together the University of Strasbourg in France, the University of Freiburg in Germany, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. The North America Center for Research on Advanced Materials (NORA) brings together Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Driving Forces

The reason for this drive to establish new research centers around the world is that companies are discovering that different regions need different products. So rather than develop new products in one central location and then try to introduce them around the world, plastic producers are beginning to develop specific products for specific regions. In addition, regional research centers allow these companies to take advantage of the scientific expertise in different countries, by both employing local scientists and collaborating with local universities and companies.

“We must adjust our resources accordingly to the market needs,” said Daniel Meyer, head of Bayer MaterialScience’s coatings, adhesives, and specialties business unit at the opening of its new Dubai laboratory. “We are therefore making targeted investments in the individual regions in order to maintain or further expand our leading market position.”

“By advancing our lab capabilities and research activities, we can provide a much better service for our local silicones customers in Southeast Asia,” explains Patrick de Wolf, managing director of Wacker Southeast Asia.

This also means that each company’s regional research centers are tending to focus on different areas of research, depending on the requirements of their local markets. Solvay’s new Asian RD&T centers will each have different areas of expertise: The Indian center will specialize in high-performance polymers, organic chemistry, nanocomposites, biotechnology, and green chemistry; the Korean center will develop polymer products for electronics, lithium ion batteries, and solar cells; and the Chinese center will adapt and develop polymer products specifically for the Chinese market. The decision by Solvay and Wacker to focus on developing products for electronic applications at their Korean centers is driven purely by the strength of the electronics sector in South Korea, which plays host to major electronics companies such as Samsung.

As well as establishing their own polymer research centers, companies are also collaborating with academic polymer research centers. Usually outcrops from universities and research institutes, these academic centers have tended to proliferate in countries with strong chemical and plastics industries. Germany, as Europe’s largest plastic producer accounting for 30% of European production, is thus home to many such centers, including the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz, the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer (IAP) Research in Potsdam, and the Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research in Dresden. 

Government Funding

Although these centers do collaborate with major plastic producers—for example, MPI-P and BASF established a joint laboratory to research the advanced carbon material known as graphene in 2012—they probably have more to offer to smaller companies. This means both small plastics producers that don’t have the resources to establish their own networks of research centers, and other companies that don’t possess the necessary plastics expertise in-house. These collaborations often take the form of multi-partner projects, many of which receive funding from the European Commission or funding agencies in specific countries.

For example, the Fraunhofer IAP is currently taking part in a €4 million project to develop novel materials and processes for producing organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), which is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany, the UK Technology Strategy Board, and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency. Other participants include the German companies Novaled and Tridonic, the Austrian company Zumtobel Lighting, and Cambridge Display Technology and Durham University, both in the UK. Each participant will focus on a different task, with Fraunhofer IAP developing charge transport polymers that can be used for the solution processing of OLEDs.

Many other European countries possess similar polymer research centers taking part in similar projects. The AIMPLAS Plastic Technology Centre in Valencia, Spain, is participating in the NATURTRUK project, which aims to develop a novel biodegradable material based on the bioplastic polylactic acid for use as a replacement for acrylonitrile butadiene styrene in the cabins of trucks. The project involves ten partners, including six small-to-medium-size companies and the car manufacturer Volvo, and is partly funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework program.

With funding from Invest Northern Ireland, Queen’s University Belfast’s Polymer Processing Research Centre (PPRC) has been working with the British company Kanteq, which produces body protectors for use by horse riders and motorcyclists. PPRC and Kanteq have been studying the impact, compression, and flexural properties of polyurethane and polyvinyl chloride-nitrile foams for use in these body protectors.

With all these academic and industrial centers hard at work around the world, research into novel polymers and plastics looks set to continue for at least another 100 years.