Silicone Polymers—Celebrating 80 Years of the Direct Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Direct Process, also denoted the Rochow Process, and the Müller–Rochow Process, is the most common industrial method for preparing organosilicon compounds, and is the basis of the silicone industry. It was first reported independently by Eugene G. Rochow and Richard Müller 80 years ago. The process has allowed for a vast range of silicone‐based polymers to be prepared and, subsequently, has enabled a multitude of novel technologies due the broad versatility of silicone polymers. In this special issue of Macromolecular Rapid Communications, we use the anniversary of the debut of industrial silicone polymer chemistry to look to the future by focusing on some of the recent excellent advances done within the areas of preparation of novel silicone polymers and the application of these polymers in exciting areas. The 16 articles that make up this special issue of Macromolecular Rapid Communications paint a current picture of the state of the art of widely exploited silicone materials. With pleasure, we note that contributions were received from both established researchers with lifelong expertise in the development of the field and emerging investigators with a wealth of ideas on the versatility of silicone polymers. Despite worldwide Covid‐19‐related lockdowns in this past year, the contributing authors nevertheless managed to submit excellent articles, and we are grateful for the extra effort they invested to make this special issue happen to celebrate 80 years of silicone materials. This special issue features one review and 15 communications spanning many research areas. At the fundamental level, and in an area where silicone‐based materials have had tremendous importance, Michael Owen reviews and discusses silicone surface chemistry fundamentals (article number 2000360). Tom McCarthy et al. discuss the anomalous water permeability of highly hydrophobic polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and how this behavior suggests nano‐structuring in a material that is otherwise believed to be almost fully amorphous (article number 2000682).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".