Homopolymers applications, others

About 90% of the PVC produced is used in the form of homopolymers, the other 10% as copolymers and terpolymers. The largest application of homopolymers PVC compounds, particularly unplasticized grades, is for rigid pipes and fittings, most commonly as suspension homopolymers of high bulk density compounded as powder blends. 

The importance of these measurements is not only in their application to simple homopolymers where other techniques abound, but in blend and composite syst ns where one would like to understand the behavior of each individual phase. In N2 and NIO the N groups are sensors of the PMMA phase. 

As mentioned earlier, unmodified polystyrene first found application where rigidity and low cost were important prerequisites. Other useful properties were the transparency and high refractive index, freedom from taste, odour and toxicity, good electrical insulation characteristics, low water absorption and comparatively easy processability. Carefully designed and well-made articles from polystyrene were often found to be perfectly suitable for the end-use intended. On the other hand the extensive use of the polymers in badly designed and badly made products which broke only too easily caused a reaction away from the homopolymer. This resulted, first of all, in the development of the high-impact polystyrene and today this is more important than the unmodified polymer (60% of Western European market). 

More recently, we have extended the use of the condensation polymerization method to include many other combinations of alkyl and aryl groups in both homopolymers as well as copolymers. Future systematic studies of these materials should provide valuable information on the structure/property relationships which are applicable to this class of polymers. 

Perfluoropolyethers emerged on the market in the early 1970s. The first perfluoropolyether was the homopolymer of hexafluoropropylene oxide produced by DuPont, which has the structure [—CF2CF(CF3)0—] and this new lubricant material was called Krytox.31,32 Krytox was and is used in most of the vacuum pumps and diffusion oil pumps for the microelectronics industry because it does not produce any hydrocarbon or fluorocarbon vapor contamination. It also has important applications in the lubrication of computer tapes and in other data processing as well as military and space applications. 

Modern life and civilization opened the way to other important practical applications of heterocycles, for example dyestuffs, copolymers, solvents, photographic sensitizers and developers, and in the rubber industry antioxidants and vulcanization accelerators. Some of the sturdiest polymers, such as Kevlar, have aromatic rings. Melamines (2,4,6-triamino-substituted s-triazines) are monomers with numerous applications as both homopolymers and copolymers. Scheme 9 shows a few examples of compounds with various applications in our daily life, having in common the same building block, the aromatic s-triazine. 

Copolymerization allows the synthesis of an almost unlimited number of different products by variations in the nature and relative amounts of the two monomer units in the copolymer product. A prime example of the versatility of the copolymerization process is the case of polystyrene. More than 11 billion pounds per year of polystyrene products are produced annually in the United States. Only about one-third of the total is styrene homopolymer. Polystyrene is a brittle plastic with low impact strength and low solvent resistance (Sec. 3-14b). Copolymerization as well as blending greatly increase the usefulness of polystyrene. Styrene copolymers and blends of copolymers are useful not only as plastics but also as elastomers. Thus copolymerization of styrene with acrylonitrile leads to increased impact and solvent resistance, while copolymerization with 1,3-butadiene leads to elastomeric properties. Combinations of styrene, acrylonitrile, and 1,3-butadiene improve all three properties simultaneously. This and other technological applications of copolymerization are discussed further in Sec. 6-8. 

Desirable fixative properties superior to PVP homopolymer can be specified by judicious selection of the amount of vinyl acetate. Hair sprays are limited in the molecular weight of the resin because if they are too hLgh the resulting viscosity of the formulation will result in a poor (coarse) spray pattern. Increasing the VP/VA ratio causes properties to increase in the direction shown by the arrows. Other applications for VP/VA copolymers are uses as water-soluble or remoistenable hot melt adhesives, pharmaceutical tablet coatings, binders, and controlled-release substrates. 

NMR has not been widely employed to study dynamics in block copolymer melts, although field gradient NMR can provide a wealth of information on the diffusion of block copolymer chains (Fleischer et al. 1993). The orientation of a deuterated homopolymer in a lamellar diblock copolymer (in a glassy state) was determined using 2H NMR by Valic et al. (1994,1995). Other applications of NMR to probe polymer chain dynamics and details of experimental protocols are described by Bovey and Jelinksi (1989). 

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