1930s: A Happy Accident and the Discovery of the Father of Fluorinated Polymers In 1938, a young chemist at DuPont, Roy J. Plunkett, was conducting research on new refrigerants to replace Freon when he stumbled upon something completely unexpected. One candidate – tetrafluoroethylene (TFE) gas – was being stored in…

Amorphous fluoropolymers (AFPs) are glass-like plastics that don’t have a rigid internal structure. This gives them unique properties that are indispensable in critical industries such as semiconductors, microfluidics, optics, and photonics. Commodity fluoropolymers like PTFE (commonly known as Teflon®), PFA, and FEP have semi-crystalline structures and are widely recognized for…