Sulfur Polymer as Emerging Advanced Materials: Synthesis and Applications

Abstract

AbstractAbundant availability of inexpensive sulfur coupled with its reactivity triggered the interest of scientific community to explore the unique chemistry of sulfur for developing advanced materials. The reactivity of sulfur diradicals is used for making copolymers with cross‐linker monomer dienes through inverse vulcanization principle which is later upgraded by conducting reactions in presence of catalysts so as to achieve functionalized sulfur copolymers at lower reaction temperatures and lower time. Multi‐component reactions provide an opportunity for the direct utilization of sulfur at mild conditions. The diverse processing methodologies have further expanded the applicability of sulfur polymeric materials. The dynamicity of the S−S bonds has potential to create avenue for making self‐healing materials and usher the generation of more functionalized segmented block co‐polymers with superior properties. Interfacial condensation polymerization has successfully been implemented for the generation of sulfur nanoparticles in aqueous medium. The recent emergence of sulfur quantum dots through various approaches generated more advanced sulfur based materials in terms of expanding sulfur applications. This review provides an account on advanced materials synthesized using sulfur as raw material and their respective applications.