Frédéric Dumur

Presentation

Frédéric Dumur is associate professor since 2008 at the University of Aix Marseille (France). Formerly at the University of Angers, the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne and the University of Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, he joined in 2008 the Institute of Radical Chemistry in Marseille. His research focuses on photochemistry and all the related applications including radical chemistry, photopolymerization and water-waste treatments. His research interest also includes the polymerization of organic monolayers on various metal substrates for optoelectronic applications. From 2013 to 2015, he was also associate researcher at the (Integration: from Material to Systems) IMS laboratory at the University of Bordeaux where he worked on the elaboration of organic light emitting diodes. He co-authored about 350 publications and 10 book chapters.

Research Project

During last decades, the great population increase worldwide together with the need of people to adopt improved conditions of living led to a dramatically increase of the consumption of polymers. Materials appear interwoven with our consuming society where it would be hard to imagine a modern society today without plastics which have found a myriad of uses in fields as diverse as household appliances, packaging, construction, medicine, electronics, and automotive and aerospace components. A continued increase in the use of plastics has greatly stimulated the development of new polymerization techniques. In this field, photopolymerization that makes use of light (and even sunlight) to convert a liquid monomer as a solid constitute an interesting approach, especially, if energy-saving and low-cost irradiation setups such as LEDs can be used. Additionally, light is a traceless reagent, enabling to develop more environmentally friendly polymerization processes. However, photopolymerization is currently facing a major drawback in industry, namely the use of photoinitiating systems that can only be activated with UV light, at the origin of numerous safety concerns. The present research project aims at addressing this issue by developing new photoinitiating systems activable under visible light and low light intensity. Especially, the careful selection of the chromophore used to interact with light could pave the way towards sunlight polymerization.