Description

Polysulfone describes a family of thermoplastic polymers. These polymers are known for their toughness and stability at high temperatures. They contain the subunit aryl-SO*-aryl, the defining feature of which is the sulfone group. Polysulfones were introduced in ***5 by Union Carbide. Due to the high cost of raw materials and processing, polysulfones are used in specialty applications and often are a superior replacement for polycarbonates.

Applications
Polysulfone has one of the highest service temperature of all melt-processable thermoplastics. Its resistance to high temperatures gives it a role of a flame retardant, without compromising its strength that usually results from addition of flame retardants. Its high hydrolysis stability allows its use in medical applications requiring autoclave and steam sterilization. However, it has low resistance to some solvents and undergoes weathering; this weathering instability can be offset by adding other materials into the polymer.
Polysulfone allows easy manufacturing of membranes, with reproducible properties and controllable size of pores down to *0 nanometres. Such membranes can be used in applications like hemodialysis, waste water recovery, food and beverage processing, and gas separation. These polymers are also used in the automotive and electronic industries. Filter cartridges made from polysulfone membranes offer extremely high flow rates at very low differential pressures when compared with Nylon or polypropylene media. Additionally filter cartridges made from polysulfone can be sterilized with in line steam or in the autoclave without loss of integrity up to *0 times.
Polysulfone can be reinforced with glass fibers. The resulting composite material has twice the tensile strength and three time increase of its modulus.
Polysulfone is used as a dielectric in capacitors.
Polysulfone is commercially available from Solvay Specialty Polymers, BASF, and PolyOne Corporation.
Polysulfone is often used as a copolymer. Recently sulfonated polyethersulfones (SPES) have been studied as a promising material candidate among many other aromatic hydrocarbon based polymers for highly durable, proton exchange membrane in proton exchange membrane fuel cells applications.[2] Several reviews have reported many progress on studying the durability of many reports on this work. The biggest challenge for SPES application in fuel cells is improving its chemical durability. Under oxidative environment, SPES can undergo sulfonic group detachment and main chain scission. However the latter is more dominant, midpoint scission and unzip mechanism have been proposed as the degradation mechanism depending on the strength of the polymer backbone.
Polysulfone is used as filtration media. The pore size can be very small, down to 0.2 µm or less for use in filter sterilization.
Polysulfone was the primary component of the gold-plated Lunar Extravehicular Visor Assembly, the iconic gold-film visor portion of the Apollo space-suits worn by Apollo astronauts during their lunar excursions.