How this is organised
The library behind the structure search holds 968 polymers. These pages lay it out by family, so you can read a whole class at once rather than querying it one structure at a time – useful when you are choosing between esters in a series, or want to see what else shares a backbone with the polymer you have.
Grouping is by polymerisation chemistry rather than by application, because that is what the structure–property arguments actually turn on: every acrylate answers to the same rules about ester length and backbone rotation, whether it ends up in an adhesive or a photoresist. Each polymer appears on exactly one page.
The library as a map
Every structure in the library placed next to the ones it chemically resembles. Nothing is predicted here and no property was used to build it: each repeat unit becomes thirty descriptors read straight off its atoms and bonds – what elements it contains, how branched it is, whether it is aromatic, what links its backbone – and those are projected onto two dimensions. Polymers that sit together sit together because they are built alike.
Hover a point to name it. Click to search for it.
How well does it work? Take each structure’s eight nearest neighbours on the map and ask how often they come from the same family: 45 %, against 13 % if the points were scattered at random – a 3.4× lift. In the full thirty-dimensional descriptor space that figure is 54 %, so flattening it to a picture costs about a fifth of the structure it found. That gap is the honest limit of any two-dimensional map, and it is why this one is for browsing rather than for drawing conclusions from a distance.
The families overlap, and that is chemistry rather than a failure of the method: an acrylate and a methacrylate differ by one methyl group, a polyester and a polyamide by a single atom in the linkage. Where the map does separate them cleanly, it is telling you the backbones really are different.
Families
Acrylate polymers
The soft half of the acrylics - why an acrylate sits eighty degrees below the methacrylate that looks just like it.
Methacrylate polymers
One extra methyl group on the backbone, and the whole family turns rigid.
Silicones and siloxanes
An inorganic backbone with the lowest glass transition and the highest gas permeability in common use.
Vinyl polymers
One backbone, every property – what hangs off the chain decides whether you get a bag, a pipe, or a non-stick pan.
Diene elastomers
The rubbers – and the reason natural rubber and gutta-percha, chemically identical, are a tyre and a golf ball shell.
Polyesters
An ester in the backbone – rigid enough for a bottle, hydrolysable enough for a dissolving suture.
Polyamides
Hydrogen bonds across every repeat unit – the nylons, and why they take up water.
Polyethers, lactones and other ring-opening polymers
Strain in a ring, spent to build a chain – and the route to almost every end-functional prepolymer.
Conjugated and high-performance polymers
Aromatic rings linked ring-to-ring – conduct electricity if the conjugation is continuous, survive 300 °C if it is not.
Block copolymers
Two incompatible polymers tied together, unable to separate – so they organise instead.
Bottlebrush polymers
A side chain on every backbone unit, crowded enough that the molecule stops behaving like a chain.
Related
- Structure search – draw a repeat unit and identify it against this library
- Glossary – the terms used throughout these pages
- Mechanisms – how each polymerisation in this list actually runs