High styrene content, cyclization

In many samples, no resonances due to uncyclized anhydride units were detected. This was particularly true of copolymers with high styrene contents. Table I lists the compositions determined for styrene-methacrylic anhydride copolymers prepared at 40°. The styrene contents of the copolymers are in good agreement with those reported by Smets, et al., for copolymers prepared from comparable monomer ratios, but where the anhydride concentration was 2M. However, Smets, et al. report that 30-50 percent of the anhydride units were uncyclized in their copolymers and it appears that the extent of cyclization is better than 90 percent, generally about... 

Several theoretical treatments of cyclocopolymerization have been reported previously (8-11). These relate the compositions of cyclocopolymers to monomer feed concentrations and appropriate rate constant ratios. To our knowledge, procedures for calculating sequence distributions for either cyclocopolymers or for copolymers derived from them have not been developed previously. In this paper we show that procedures for calculating sequence distributions of terpolymers can be used for this purpose. Most previous studies on styrene-methacrylic anhydride copolymerizations (10,12,13) have shown that a high proportion of the methacrylic anhydride units are cyclized in these polymers. Cyclization constants were determined from monomer feed concentrations and the content of uncyclized methacrylic anhydride units in the copolymers. These studies invoked simplifying assumptions that enabled the conventional copolymer equation to be used in determinations of monomer reactivity ratios for this copolymerization system. 

---