UV-curing technology has been developed and widely used in industry for 6 decades. However, the migration of low-molecular-weight photoproducts is today an important drawback in many application fields such as food packaging materials, leading to unpleasant secondary features such as odor, blooming and contamination. Therefore, many efforts have been devoted to design polymeric photoinitiators (PPIs) and multifunctional photoinitiators (MFPIs) to overcome these drawbacks. This review introduces the development and the challenges of UV-curing technology and the state of the art of PPIs and MFPIs, in which methodologies of synthesis and characterization are meticulously discussed. Moreover, a novel classification, based on the molecular structure, has been drafted for all the PPIs conventionally reacting through photodissociation or photoreduction. Most of the PPIs and MFPIs have excellent photochemistry properties, some of which have extra properties such as amphiphile, self-floating and biocompatibility. Examples of well-defined structures are discussed in the section on MFPIs.

紫外线固化技术已经开发并在工业中广泛使用了六十年。然而，低分子量光产物的迁移如今在许多应用领域（例如食品包装材料）中是一个重要的缺点，导致令人不愉快的次要特征，例如气味，起霜和污染。因此，已经致力于设计聚合物光引发剂（PPI）和多功能光引发剂（MFPI）以克服这些缺点。这篇综述介绍了紫外线固化技术的发展和挑战以及PPI和MFPI的技术现状，在此对合成和表征方法进行了详尽的讨论。而且，已经针对所有通常通过光离解或光还原反应的PPI起草了基于分子结构的新颖分类。大多数PPI和​​MFPI具有出色的光化学性质，其中一些具有额外的性质，例如两亲性，自浮性和生物相容性。MFPI一节中讨论了定义良好的结构的示例。