The purpose of this US-China collaborative research project is to develop techniques to synthesize and then process poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) fibers so that they have ultra high strength as well as a high melting temperature. The material will be made in two steps: first, solid state polymerization will be used to produce the ultra-high molecular weight linear polymer, followed by solution/gel spinning to orient the long chain molecules. The international collaboration will benefit both principal investigators (PI) who have different and complementary expertise and equipment: the American PI Hsieh has the instrumentation for fiber analysis and polymer characterization, while the Chinese PI has the expertise and facility for fiber spinning.
