NANOPOLY · Hybrid Models for Tailoring Nano-Architectures of polymers

The large scale production of commodity polymers is increasingly shifting overseas. Europe still plays a major role in polymer processing and product development, but the competition with the US and Asia requires distinctive efforts to sustain this leadership. Thus, it is decisive for European researchers and companies to design innovative, specialised commodities and optimise current production strategies. NANOPOLY’s main scientific objective is to further create, exchange and spread-out such know-how systematically within a European network in order to make this progress available and exploitable for European industries and coming generations of researchers. NANOPOLY will be unique in combining the strengths of applied mathematics/software engineering on the one hand and macro-molecular chemistry/reaction engineering on the other hand. These two sets of competences are currently rather unrelated but represent an important source of innovation for creating new models and associated software tools that permit new rational designs of polymer materials. NANOPOLY’s main training objective is the education of a new generation of researchers who are able to bridge the still significant gap between the two mentioned sets of competences. The job market urgently calls for researchers with suchlike sophisticated knowledge and interdisciplinary training. These prospects will make participation in the network a rewarding career option. Through superior training, intense cooperation, and outreach the network will build-up an exeptional multi-disciplinary, European-based community that is able to achieve the crucial transfer of knowledge between the associated fields and thus permit major innovation in improving technological processes that allow tailoring nano-architectures of polymers to specific requirements.