Macromolecular Rapid Communications, Vol.26, No.10, 796-802, 2005
Laser single pulse initiated RAFT polymerization for assessing chain-length dependent radical termination kinetics
A novel method combining RAFT polymerization with pulsed-laser initiation for determining chain-length dependent termination rate coefficients, k(t), is presented. Degenerative chain-transfer in RAFT enables single-pulse pulsed-laser polymerization (SP-PLP) traces to be measured on systems with a narrow radical distribution that remains essentially unchanged during the experiment. SP-PLP-RAFT experiments at different polymerization times allow for determining kt as a function of chain length via classical kinetics assuming chain-length independent k(t).
Keywords:chain-length dependent termination;kinetics (polym.);living/controlled free-radical polymerization;reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT);single-pulse pulsed-laser polymerization (SP-PLP)