Unfolding Status of Polymers through the Past and Present to Future

Abstract

Historians frequently classify the different ages according to the materials that man used as tools, weapons and utensils for meeting basic necessities. The successive early ages are the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age and the steel age. Until the 19th century man depended on use of stones, metals, wood ceramics, glass, hydes and skins, horns and natural fibers. However, over the last century and a half, polymers grouped into two new classes of closely related materials, plastics and rubbers, have been introduced and put to wide spread use, thus, putting the erstwhile conventional materials to increasing challenge. As a group of polymers hold a unique position because of their light weight, a good mix of high strength and good flexibility, special electrical electronic and optical properties, resistance to chemicals and weathering and for being amenable to fabrication into complex forms and useful moulded articles, and also producing soft, flexible solvent dispersed coatings and adhesives and swollen jelly like materials. Polymers can be used for bonding together different objects, sealing joints, filling cavities and for bearing loads and even conducting electricity. These materials are also used as inputs in agriculture, in medicine and surgery and for replacement of human body-parts and organs. Even memory devices can be preared from polymers. No wonder that modem age is called the ‘Polymer Age’.