Modeling and Characterization of Recycled High-Performance Polymer Materials

Dear Colleagues, 

Recycling is an important issue used to conserve our limited resources and save on energy. While recycling is a widely researched topic for packaging materials and other similar short-lived applications, for other high-performing materials, this is less of a present topic. High-performance polymers are characterized by their outstanding thermal stability, chemical resistivity, and mechanical properties. In addition, they are suited for a variety of applications in many different areas, including automotive, aerospace, defense, electronics, medical, and sport and safety equipment. Due to their nature, these polymers are often more complex to produce, thus requiring more energy and overall effort, and they are therefore even more interesting to recycle. This Special Issue of Polymers is dedicated to the reprocessing and recycling of high-performance polymer materials, with an emphasis on modeling such processes and characterizing said polymer materials. Computational modeling and simulation have emerged as an indispensable tool to complement and/or guide experiments in every field. The complex and intriguing mechanical/physical properties of polymeric materials, originating from multiple spatial and temporal scales, call for advanced multiscale computational techniques in order to account for the all-important mechanisms in polymers. Using these to understand the complex structure–processing–property relationships in polymer-based composites and blends helps to further develop polymeric materials. Various polymer materials characterization methods are needed to investigate material properties, often by combining them to extract even more valuable information which would otherwise be inaccessible, and with that deliver the basis for modeling approaches. This Special Issue aims to compile original and cutting-edge research works in the field of the modeling and characterization of reprocessed and recycled high-performance polymer materials. 

Prof. Dr. Christoph Burgstaller
Prof. Dr. Gernot Zitzenbacher
Guest Editors

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• functional
• manufacturing
• characterization
• modeling