The strong participation from the polymer manufacturing industry from North America, Europe and Asia shows the industrial relevance and need of such a conference.
Sections were divided according to main topic areas into Separation and Fractionation, High Throughput, Thermal and Crystallinity Analysis, Spectroscopy, and Rheology. In addition to the oral presentations, 29 posters were displayed. Some of these oral and poster presentations were published in volume 257 of Macromolecular Symposia.
The International Conference on Polyolefin Characterization will be held biannually, alternating between North American and European locations. The 2 nd ICPC will take place from September 14 to 17, 2008, in Valencia, Spain (http://www.icpc-conference.org/information.html).
A clear message came out of the conference: the development of polyolefin resins with complex molecular architectures will require the use of more powerful characterization techniques and stimulate the development of new analytical methods. The use of hyphenated fractionation methods is already common in industry and academia, and we expect that automated cross-fractionation instruments will be applied routinely in the near future. The use of high-throughput methods is also changing the way polyolefin analysis is being approached, with emphasis on high-definition and low-analysis-time techniques. Finally, some new techniques, such as molecular topology fractionation, high-temperature gradient HPLC, and dilute solution differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) have the potential to reveal polyolefin microstructural details that so far have been difficult, if not impossible, to measure by conventional characterization techniques.
A few highlights from the 1 st ICPC are briefly reviewed below.