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GRAIN-FIELD STATISTICS AND ITS APPLICATIONS

MISSION AND OBJECTIVE

Creation of a New Polymer Physics School and Research Center

"to advance fundamental research in physics of interactions"

Our research and teaching objective is to implement and perfect a new statistical model of interactive physics that considers the properties of interacting entities from a different point of view than the current models: the Grain-Field Statistics. This model defines the interactions as a dynamic process of staged integration of local pairing into a collective network.

Our first implementation of the new statistics is to describe interactions in polymers.

The interest in polymers stems from the fact that due to their long chains, relaxations occur at slow rates compared to those for small molecules or atoms. These slow kinetics during a change of state permits us to develop a new understanding of their behavior during transient periods when they are out of equilibrium, and establish a better understanding of the time invariant steady states which are themselves subject to variations and instabilities. The physics of smaller entities' interactions (between particles, atoms, molecules) classically addresses the steady states, which is the state we normally measure, and thus Statistical Mechanics is not formulated from the transients dynamics which created these steady states. The implication to physics of original solutions found for polymers may change that and forge new paradigms.

We introduce a new statistical model for polymers which we call the grain-field statistics. This represents the core of the mathematical description of the physics of dual-interaction. This model describes both the network and the local level of interactions of a system of conformers taken from all the macromolecules considered collectively; a system is no longer defined as a singular macromolecule embedded in a mean field of influences by other macromolecules, which is the traditional approach.

The main achievement of this new physics of interactions is our new understanding of "entanglements" in polymers, the corner stone of polymer physics. It opens up new revolutionary applications for polymer materials, in particular new ways to process them by reducing significantly the energy necessary to make them flow in molding presses. This is achieved by lowering the viscosity by "disentanglement". Another potential revolutionary application could be to convert used plastics, which are shamefully considered as waste as soon as they are used, as a source to store electrical energy, an application which we call "Plastic Battery Fuel" and hope to validate and commercialize this concept to revolutionize the plastic recycling industry and rehabilitate the reputation of polymers as environmental polluants, a view held by the general population.

We define fundamental research directions and qualify the research projects solely within this framework.

Our objective is to create, animate and expand, via the University of the Basque Country and via the Internet, a research activity initially focused solely on the understanding of the physical and rheological properties of polymers, with the mission to advance fundamental research in polymer physics, improve the physical behavior of macromolecules, induce the plastic industry to clean up their act by investing in the development of plastic battery fuels from recycled plastics and create new materials .

The criteria of choice to define and accomplish this mission will be as follows:

The New Polymer Physics Research group, physically located in Donostia San Sebastian, will also broadcast globally via the internet to students, professors, and researchers from other institutions and universities throughout the world, discussing and partnering on research projects sponsored by public and private funds, grants and awards.

Lectures and seminars are becoming available and being posted at regular intervals, via the Internet. Most are available to the public, some of them to subscribing members only. Several internet sites enable the participants to communicate amongst themselves, sharing their thoughts and research by videoconferencing and other multi-media means. Currently we are using several commercial services as the interactive platforms to teach online (WIZIQ, Polycom).

The research subjects proposed and posted as lectures and seminars within this New Polymer Physics Campus site and the New School Polymer Physics Blogger site are chosen not only because of the theoretical challenge they represent in polymer physics, they are also selected because of their applicability to solve practical problems of the plastic industry, specifically producing clean, re-usable products processed with minimum energy.

Our goal is to partner actively with selected individuals, universities and other research groups that are highly motivated to work with us to achieve our research and teaching objectives.

We welcome members from the industry to join our consortium to benefit from the particular applications associated with the fundamental research at the Grain-Field Campus. We actively seek the participation of the industry to create links, sponsorships, development contracts and consultancy agreements with the consortium members.

The success of the Grain-Field Campus will be judged by its impact, not only at the fundamental level of understanding polymers, but also at a more practical level by helping plastic converters, processors, compounders and resin manufacturers to create re-usable plastics. For instance, we call the Pink-Flow technology the application to store energy in plastics, in particular recycled plastics, and release it like a battery would do.

Finally, the longer term goal of this new school of physics is to develop a new understanding of the interactions in systems beyond polymers: molecules, atoms and particles. The scope is to determine how Time and Space and Heat interact to structure matter the way classical physics has revealed it (the standard model); the ultimate goal is to re-write the fundamental aspects of reality (quantum mechanics and relativity) and its origin from the Time-Space-Heat Cross-Duality.