Polyimides

Nano-reinforced polymeric systems have demonstrated a great deal of interest
within academia and industry, due to the intrinsic properties of the graphene nanofillers,
having excellent mechanical, thermal and electrical properties. The reinforcement of multiwall
carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs) were introduced
into a low cost, non-carcinogenic, high temperature PMR type polyimide resin. The effects
of the interfacial interaction and dispersion quality resulted in improvement in the glass
transition temperature (Tg), elastic modulus and thermal stability by, 31°C, 63% and 16°C,
respectively. In fine, this study presents a simple but effective high temperature polyimide
(HTPI) nanocomposites manufacturing procedure and established that nanoparticle
reinforcement can be used to improve both thermal and mechanical properties.

Research is under way to fabricate large-area thin-film transistor arrays produced on a thin polyimide substrate. The polyimide substrate is available in long thirty centimeter wide rolls of tape, and lithography hardware is being developed to expose hundreds of meters of this tape with electrically addressable light modulators which can resolve 2 $\mu$m features. A fault-tolerant memory architecture is proposed that is capable of storing one hour of D-1 component digital video (almost 10^12 bits) in real-time, on eight two-hundred meter long tapes. Appropriate error correcting codes and error concealment are proposed to compensate for drop-outs resulting from manufacturing defects so as to yield video images with error rates low enough to survive several generations of copies.