Les polyimides sont des polymères a hautes performances souvent utilisés dans des environnements dits hostiles (hautes températures et hautes pressions, forts frottement, …). Ils sont connus pour leur forte résistance thermique et chimique mais aussi pour leur faible processabilité. La technique de synthèse la plus utilisée industriellement est celle utilisant les poly(acides amiques) comme intermédiaires, ce qui nécessite des solvants couteux et dangereux pour l’homme et l’environnement comme le crésol ou la N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone. Les polyimides semi-aromatiques ont eux des températures caractéristiques (fusion, transition vitreuse) plus basses que les polyimides aromatiques, ce qui permet d’augmenter leur processabilité (extrusion, injection). Une nouvelle technique de synthèse basée sur la polymérisation de sels précurseurs permet de synthétiser des polyimides (aromatiques ou non) en utilisant des solvants moins coûteux et moins dangereux. De nombreuses recherches ont été menées sur ce thème ces cinquante dernières années. À notre connaissance, cette technique n’est pas être utilisée industriellement. L’objectif de ces travaux de thèse consiste en la synthèse de polyimides semi aromatiques via la polymérisation à l’état solide de sels précurseur. Une étude préliminaire sur des molécules de faible masse molaire a permis de mettre en avant les paramètres critiques de l’étape de salification et le comportement thermique lors de l’imidification. Un protocole de salification et de polymérisation à l’état solide a été mis au point puis utilisé pour synthétiser trois polyimides semi-aromatiques présentant une solubilité accrue. Cette solubilité a permis une caractérisation complète des polymères, nous conduisant à un meilleur contrôle la synthèse. Des éléments de réponse au sujet des mécanismes réactionnels ont été proposés. Deux techniques visant le contrôle de la masse molaire des polymères synthétisés ont été testées puis comparées en termes d’efficacité et sur leur caractère industrialisable. Enfin, deux polymères synthétisés ont étés mis en œuvre puis caractérisés mécaniquement. / Polyimides are known as high performance polymers, they are used in harsh environments (high temperatures, high pressure, …). They also have low processibility. The most used industrial synthesis process is using poly(amic acid) as reaction intermediate. This process requires high prices solvents that are harmful for human being and environment such as n-methyl-2-pyrrolidone and cresol. Semi-aromatic polyimides have lower characteristic temperatures and can thus be processed easily. A new way of synthesis based on salt polymerisation can be used to synthesize polyimides (aromatic or not), this process only needs simple solvents such as water or ethanol. Numerous researches have been made on this subject in the past 50 years. To our knowledge, this technique is not used at industrial scale. The goal of this work is to synthetize semi-aromatic polyimides using solid-state salt polymerisation. A preliminary examination on low weight molecules allowed us to highlight critical parameters on every step of reactions and thermal behaviour. Both salification and polymerization protocols are been made with the view to synthetize 3 soluble polyimides. This solubility allowed us to characterize our polymers and to enhance polymerization control. Those characterizations provided us answers on salification and polymerization mechanisms. Two molar mass control techniques have then been compared in terms of industrialization and efficiency. At the end, polymers have been synthetized, processed and then characterized in physic-chemical and mechanical ways.

This thesis suggests the use of tools from the disciplines of Computational Linguistics and Knowledge Representation with the idea that such tools would enable the partial automation of two processes of Conceptual Design: the analysis of Requirements and the synthesis of concepts of solution. The viewpoint on Conceptual Design developed in this research is based on the systematic methodologies developed in the literature. The evolution of these methodologies provided precise description of the tasks to be achieved by the designing team in order to achieve successful design. Therefore, the argument of this thesis is that it is possible to create computer models of some of these tasks in order to partially automate the refinement of the design problem and the exploration of the design space. In Requirements Engineering, the definition of requirements consists in identifying the needs of various stakeholders and formalizing it into design speciႡcations. During this task, designers face the problem of having to deal with individuals from different expertise, expressing their needs with different levels of clarity. This research tackles this issue with requirements expressed in natural language (in this case in English). The analysis of needs is realised from different linguistic levels: lexical, syntactic and semantic. The lexical level deals with the meaning of words of a language. Syntactic analysis provides the construction of the sentence in language, i.e. the grammar of a language. The semantic level aims at Ⴁnding about the specific meaning of words in the context of a sentence. This research makes extensive use of a semantic atlas based on the concept of clique from graph theory. Such concept enables the computation of distances between a word and its synonyms. Additionally, a methodology and a metric of similarity was defined for clarifying requirements at syntactic, lexical and semantic levels. This methodology integrates tools from research collaborators. In the synthesis process, a Knowledge Representation of the necessary concepts for enabling computers to create concepts of solution was developed. Such, concepts are: function, input/output Ⴂow, generic organs, behaviour, components. The semantic atlas is also used at that stage to enable a mapping between functions and their solutions. It works as the interface between the concepts of this Knowledge Representation.