* It has been rumored that a bumble bee has such aerodynamic deficiencies that it should be incapable of flight. Fiberglass-reinforced polymer com posites, similarly, have two (apparently) insurmountable obstacles to per formance: 1) Water can hydrolyze any conceivable bond between organic and inorganic phase, and 2) Stresses across the interface during temperature cycling (resulting from a mismatch in thermal expansion coefficients) may exceed the strength of one of the phases. Organofunctional silanes are hybrid organic-inorganic compounds that are used as coupling agents across the...

* Much progress has been made in the last 8 years in understanding the theory and practice of silane coupling agents. A major advance in this direction was the measurement of true equilibrium constants for the hydroly sis and formation of siloxane bonds. Equilibrium constants for bond reten tion are so favorable that a silane coupling agent on silica has a thousandfold advantage for bond retention in the presence of water over an alkoxysilane bond formed from hydroxy-functional polymers and silica. In practice, the bonds of certain epoxies to silane-primed glass resist debonding by water...

* It has been rumored that a bumble bee has such aerodynamic deficiencies that it should be incapable of flight. Fiberglass-reinforced polymer com- posites, similarly, have two (apparently) insurmountable obstacles to per- formance: 1) Water can hydrolyze any conceivable bond between organic and inorganic phase, and 2) Stresses across the interface during temperature cycling (resulting from a mismatch in thermal expansion coefficients) may exceed the strength of one of the phases. Organofunctional silanes are hybrid organic-inorganic compounds that are used as coupling agents across the...