<Emphasis Type="Italic">In Situ</Emphasis> Synchrotron Radiation Techniques: Watching Deformation-induced Structural Evolutions of Polymers

Synchrotron radiation (SR) provides highly brilliant light with tunable wavelength from hard X-ray to far infrared, on which scattering, spectroscopy and imaging techniques with high time and spatial resolutions have been developed for in situ study on biological system and materials like polymer. With examples on flow-induced crystallization of polymer, deformation of nanoparticle filler network in rubber composite and necking propagation in tensile stretch, current work attempts to demonstrate the advantages of in situ synchrotron radiation X-ray scattering, X-ray nano-CT and infrared imaging in the study of deformation-induced multi-scale structural evolutions of polymers. With time resolution up to sub-ms, synchrotron radiation is expected to play a great role in understanding non-equilibrium polymer physics under processing and service conditions, while high-throughput characterization platform based on synchrotron radiation opens the possibility to establish polymer Materials Genome database in processing parameter space within reasonable time, which can serve as the roadmap for industrial polymer processing and accelerate material innovation.