Recent Advances in Fluorine-containing Materials with Extreme Environment Resistance

The extreme environment resistance materials can be normally used under severe conditions (e.g. T <=-50 degrees C or T >= 200 C degrees, 1000 h exposed to UV light etc.), which common hydrocarbon materials cannot tolerate. It was found that fluorine atoms can effectively enhance the extreme environment resistance property of materials. The reason why fluorine atoms have such ability is mainly due to two key factors: first, fluorine and carbon elements are in the same cycle of the periodic table, the electronegativity of fluorine is large (4.0) and its atomic radius is small; second, polarization of fluorine atom is extremely low. The C-F bond is the strongest chemical single bond (>= 116 kcal/mol) in which the carbon atom participates. It is a short bond and highly polarized. This paper makes brief introduction to the development and present situation of fluorine- containing materials with extreme environment resistance. In the field of fluorination methods, the history of fluorine chemistry since 1970s, the researches on the formation and fracture of carbon-fluorine bond, the influence of fluorine on the formation of carbon-carbon bond and the related researches on polyfluoro-arylation methods are introduced. This paper also introduces the important results of fluorine-containing materials in lithium isotope extraction, thermo-stable fluoropolymers which can be applied in aviation, aerospace, automobile and other fields, as well as the preparation of high-performance fluorine- containing materials with low dielectric constant in electronic equipment and communication fields. In the future, how to further develop and optimize the fluorine-containing materials with extreme environment resistance and put the research results into large-scale use is the working direction for researchers.