Since their commercialization in the late 1940s, applications for synthetic polymers have grown at an extraordinary rate, to the point where polymers are now ubiquitous in our society. The demands placed upon polymer performance have paralleled the growth in applications and has driven the development of sophisticated multiconstituent polymer formulations with many outstanding physical and mechanical properties. Many applications require that a polymeric material be attached to or in contact with another material. In some cases, such as the classic nonstick fry pan, as well as lubrication and release paper, it is desirable to create surfaces that do not interact with the material in contact. On the other hand, in applications such as rubber toughening of blends, filled or fiber-reinforced polymers, and coatings, dissimilar materials must adhere to each other if high performance is to be obtained. While the majority of the research and development efforts to date have centered on optimizing bulk properties, the focus is now shifting toward the development of polymer systems with controlled surface and interfacial properties.

The recent flurry of activity in polymer interfacial science can be traced to the simultaneous emergence of three factors: a strong commercial need to control the surface properties of advanced multicomponent polymer systems, the availability of sophisticated theoretical methods for studying polymer surface and interphase problems, and the devel opment of new characterization techniques capable of investigating molecular level structure at polymer interphases. The seven articles that comprise this issue provide an overview of basic polymer interface science by discussing some of the current advances in polymer interface theory, by presenting many of the new techniques available for polymer interphase characterization, and by illustrating some of the interesting and challenging problems associated with their applications.