Ideal living cationic polymerization

Degradative transfer is not limited to radical processes. It can occur in many ionic polymerizations which are not exactly living. Degradative transfer here is, of course, harder to prove an ideal standard is missing. Nevertheless, degradative transfer has been proved, for example, during the cationic polymerization of oxetane [23],... 

In Section 9.4.1 we discussed ideal living polymerization. Let us examine the livingness of the microflow system-controlled cationic polymerization here. 

The concept of flash chemistry can be applied to polymer synthesis. Cationic polymerization can be conducted in a highly controlled manner by virtue of the inherent advantage of extremely fast micromixing and fast heat transfer. An excellent level of molecular weight control and molecular-weight distribution control can be attained without deceleration caused by equilibrium between active species and dormant species. The polymerization is complete within a second or so. The microflow system-controlled cationic polymerization seems to be close to ideal living polymerization within a short residence time. 

PBOCST is readily synthesized from the polymerization of r-hutoxycarhonyl oxystyrene via radical or cationic polymerization in liquid sulfur dioxide or alternatively by reacting poly(hydroxystyrene) with di-tert-h xty dicarbonate in the presence of a base PBOCST polymers with narrow dispersity have been prepared by living anionic polymerization of 5-tert-butyl(dimethyl)silyloxystyr-ene), followed by desilylation with HCl to form PHOST and protection with di-tert-butyl carbonate PBOCST is very transparent around the 250-nm region of the spectrum (absorbance <0.1/ p,m), thus making it an ideal candidate for DUV 248-nm lithography. 

Under appropriate conditions, mostly using alkyl halides, triflates, or tosylates as initiator, the CROP of 2-oxazolines proceeds via a living mechanism [84, 86]. In such an ideal living polymerization, all polymer chains are initiated at the same time by nucleophilic attack of the imino ether onto an electrophilic initiator. Similar to the previously discussed cationic polymerizations, the CROP... 

So far, the only living processes industrially available are anionic and cationic polymerization [50, 51], which generally suffer little or no termination. In these processes, the initiation step is very fast compared to the process time and, hence, all the chains start growing almost simultaneously. The degree of polymerization, DP, increases linearly with monomer conversion and is inversely proportional to the initiator concentration. At the same time, Poisson-like distributions of the polymer chain length are obtained with final polydispersity values dose to the ideal value of (1 -I- 1/DP). Finally, the polymer retains the ionic end groups till the end of the polymerization and the reaction is simply restarted by further addition of monomer. However, this kind of polymerization is often impractical from the industrial viewpoint, since the main requirements are high purity of all the reactants, very low temperatures, and the use of solvents. Moreover, it does not work with several widely used monomers, such as styrene. 

Indeed, cumyl carbocations are known to be effective initiators of IB polymerization, while the p-substituted benzyl cation is expected to react effectively with IB (p-methylstyrene and IB form a nearly ideal copolymerization system ). Severe disparity between the reactivities of the vinyl and cumyl ether groups of the inimer would result in either linear polymers or branched polymers with much lower MW than predicted for an in/mcr-mediated living polymerization. Styrene was subsequently blocked from the tert-chloride chain ends of high-MW DIB, activated by excess TiCU (Scheme 7.2). 

Additional well-defined side-chain liquid crystalline polymers should be synthesized by controlled polymerizations of mesogen-ic acrylates (anionic or free radical polymerizations), styrenes (anionic, cationic or free radical), vinyl pyridines (anionic), various heterocyclic monomers (anionic, cationic and metalloporphyrin-initiated), cyclobutenes (ROMP), and 7-oxanorbornenes and 7-oxanorbornadienes (ROMP). Ideally, the kinetics of these living polymerizations will be determined by measuring the individual rate constants for termination and... 

This idealized process is not possible using current methods, but there has been much progress towards approaching the ideal. Until the early 1990s, the most successful living polymerization work was in the area of anionic, cationic and group transfer polymerization processes [8]. However, although these techniques have been heavily studied in academia, they have not been implemented in industry as widely as conventional processes due to a number of drawbacks such as sensitivity to impurities, inability to react in the presence of water and undesirably low reaction... 

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