A critical review on the synthesis, characterization, and modeling of polymer grafting is presented. Although the motivation stemmed from grafting synthetic polymers onto lignocellulosic biopolymers, a comprehensive overview is also provided on the chemical grafting, characterization, and processing of grafted materials of different types, including synthetic backbones. Although polymer grafting has been studied for many decades—and so has the modeling of polymer branching and crosslinking for that matter, thereby reaching a good level of understanding in order to describe existing branching/crosslinking systems—polymer grafting has remained behind in modeling efforts. Areas of opportunity for further study are suggested within this review.

In this article, we characterize the composition of different fibers from agro-industrial waste by means of wet characterization methods, such as Van Soest Wine and TAPI standards. The compositions of these fibers are also determined by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) as an alternate form of analysis and to assess the reliability of the wet methods. The original fibers are characterized, and samples are taken at each intermediate step of the wet method. These samples are analyzed using TGA, scanning electron microscopy, and infrared spectroscopy. We discuss the results of these techniques and conclude that each of the steps of the wet characterization methods is not efficiently removing the corresponding phase. We show that the wet methods affect and modify the biomasses during the analysis, while the thermogravimetric analyses with deconvolution of signs provide an accurate determination of the different components, in shorter time periods.

A new approach for the production of polystyrene‐blue agave bagasse (BAB) composite materials is presented. In this approach, dried powdered raw BAB is press molded in the presence of a coupling agent based on glycidyl methacrylate (GMA), producing a hybrid material of poly(GMA) grafted onto BAB. The in situ reversible addition‐fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization of styrene in presence of this poly(GMA)‐graft‐BAB hybrid material results in a reinforced composite material. These composites are characterized by Fourier‐transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, gel permeation chromatography, scanning electron microscopy, impact test analyses, and dynamic mechanical analysis. The characterization results show that the amount of GMA coupling agent plays a key role in the efficiency of the process, manifested as improvement of the mechanical properties of polystyrene. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2019, 136, 47089.