The First International Conference on Polyolefin Characterization Joa ˜o B. P. Soares The First International Conference on Polyolefin Charac- terization (1 st ICPC) took place in Houston, TX, from October 16 to 18, 2006. 107 participants from 18 different countries attended the conference: 65 from the industry, 18 from vendor companies, and 24 from academia. 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 dis- played. Some of these oral and poster presentations were published in volume 257 of Macromolecular Symposia. The International Conference on Polyolefin Character- ization 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 charac- terization techniques and stimulate the development of new analytical methods. The use of hyphenated fractiona- tion methods is already common in industry and acade- mia, 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 tech- niques. 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. Cross-Fractionation Techniques Cross-fractionation techniques combine TREF (tempera- ture rising elution fractionation) and GPC (gel permeation chromatography) to generate the joint distribution of molecular weight (MWD) and chemical composition (CCD) of polyolefins. Figure 1, showing the joint MWD-CCD of a polyolefin made with two single-site catalysts, illustrates nicely the power of cross-fractionation techniques. There are two strategies for cross-fractionation of polyolefins: TREF-GPC and GPC-TREF. In TREF-GPC, the polymer sample is first fractionated according to its chemical composition (or stereo- and regioregularity, for the case poly(propylene), by TREF and then its narrow-CCD fractions are injected into a GPC instrument for MWD determination. In GPC-TREF, the reverse procedure is adopted. The proponents of GPC-TREF claim that doing the fractionation first by molecular weight eliminates the molecular weight effects on the subsequent TREF fractio- nation, leading to better resolved distributions. David Gillespie (Dow Chemical) showed that GPC-TREF can be used to obtain the joint MWD-CCD of copolymers with very low comonomer content. On the other hand, for samples with broad CCD and narrow MWD, Alberto Ortin (Polymer Char) demonstrated that TREF-GPC is very effective. Tetsuya Morioka (Japan Polychem Corporation) also showed how a TREF-GPC apparatus could be used to characterize poly(propylene) impact resins. Hyphenated (Multiple Detector) Techniques Hyphenated analytical techniques are becoming the standard choice in the polyolefin industry because they are very powerful and relatively easy to use. There are two main analytical approaches: 1) Fractionation of the resin according to the molecular weight with a GPC equipped with a chemical-composition-sensitive detector such as an infrared (IR) spectrometer to measure the average comonomer content as a function of molecular weight (GPC-IR), or 2) Fractionation of the copolymer according to chemical composition with a TREF system having a molecular-weight-sensitive detector, such as light scatter- ing (LS) or differential viscosity (DV) detectors, to measure Conference Report J. B. P. Soares Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1 E-mail: jsoares@uwaterloo.ca 244 Macromol. Mater. Eng. 2008, 293, 244–245 ß 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim DOI: 10.1002/mame.200800024