Hermans 2 Chain Initiation

The water initiated polymerization of lactams represents the classical, industrially widely used process and, therefore, a large effort has been devoted to the investigation of the kinetics and mechanism of the individual reactions. In order to establish the accepted reaction mechanism, the concentration of all components involved in the complex set of reactions had to be followed during polymerization and determined at equilibrium. Thorough studies by Hermans, Heikens, Kruissink, Reimschuessel, Staverman and by van der Want as well as by Wiloth elucidated the complex scheme of equilibrium reactions involving water, cyclic and open chain amide groups, amine and carboxyl groups [1, 2, 4, 5, 12, 13, 15, 22, 23,177, 214-235]. 

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