This symposium will assemble leading researchers from around the Pacific to discuss multidisciplinary challenges and opportunities in polyolefin catalysis, processing and commercial scale up. Recent advances in catalysis and process chemistry in academia and industry have highlighted the many challenges in translating discoveries of new organometallic complexes to processes capable of generating the millions of pounds of polyolefins produced and consumed daily around the world - many catalyst species are synthesized but few are commercialized.
Academic and industrial researchers from North America (Jordan, Waymouth, Scott, Chung, McAuley, Hustad, S.J. Brown, Miller, Sita, Gambarotta, Ye, Diefenbach, Smith, S. Brown, Son, Sibtain), Asia (Do, Nozaki, Sun, Chan, Nomura, Makio, Osakada, Ko, Sumida) and Australia (McGuinness) will address the wide range of challenges from new catalyst designs for olefin polymerization, polar monomers and functionalised polyolefins; mechanistic and modeling studies for scale up; advances in feed purification; strategies for the control of molecular architecture and properties; impact of reactor mixing and fluid dynamics; catalyst scale-up and activation; and synthesis of novel polymers. The path to success from the synthesis of a new catalyst on the lab bench to the world scale commercial reactor is a long and arduous road, fraught with challenge and opportunity.
