Polystyrene commercially available

Epoxide (5), used in Chapter 6, is made from readily available styrene (6)— the monomer of polystyrene. Commercially available /wera-chloroperbenzoic acid (MCPBA) (7) is often used for such epoxidations. 

Fig. 2. Glass-transition temperature, T, for two commercially available, miscible blend systems (a) poly(phenylene oxide) (PPO) and polystyrene (PS) (42) ...

Poly(phenylene ether). The only commercially available thermoplastic poly(phenylene oxide) PPO is the polyether poly(2,6-dimethylphenol-l,4-phenylene ether) [24938-67-8]. PPO is prepared by the oxidative coupling of 2,6-dimethylphenol with a copper amine catalyst (25). Usually PPO is blended with other polymers such as polystyrene (see PoLYETPiERS, Aromatic). However, thermoplastic composites containing randomly oriented glass fibers are available. 

A polystyrene diethylaminomethyl supported version is commercially available. 

A polystyrene supported version of diisopropyiamine is commercially available. 

In the late 1990s a crystalline form of polystyrene, syndiotactic polystyrene became commercially available but unless otherwise stated references to polystyrene in this chapter will refer to the traditional amorphous polymer. 

Amos prepared his polymer-supported reagent in two steps from commercially available polystyrene beads (bromination, then condensation with lithium diphenylphosphide). He found that a useful range of sulphoxides could be reduced effectively, in good yields and in a few hours, to give clean samples of sulphides. 

Siloxane containing interpenetrating networks (IPN) have also been synthesized and some properties were reported 59,354 356>. However, they have not received much attention. Preparation and characterization of IPNs based on PDMS-polystyrene 354), PDMS-poly(methyl methacrylate) 354), polysiloxane-epoxy systems 355) and PDMS-polyurethane 356) were described. These materials all displayed two-phase morphologies, but only minor improvements were obtained over the physical and mechanical properties of the parent materials. This may be due to the difficulties encountered in controlling the structure and morphology of these IPN systems. Siloxane modified polyamide, polyester, polyolefin and various polyurethane based IPN materials are commercially available 59). Incorporation of siloxanes into these systems was reported to increase the hydrolytic stability, surface release, electrical properties of the base polymers and also to reduce the surface wear and friction due to the lubricating action of PDMS chains 59). 

Small amounts of iso tactic polystyrene have been synthesized in the laboratory using noncommercial polymerization techniques. These polymers are capable of partially crystallizing, albeit at a very slow rate. Syndiotactic polystyrene was available commercially for several years, but its continued production proved unprofitable. 

Numerous resin supports are commercially available for solid-phase synthesis and some allow the acquisition of quite reasonable quality spectra of compounds bonded to them - and some don t. The resins to avoid (if you intend trying to monitor your reactions by MAS-NMR) are any that are based purely on cross-linked polystyrene. These are too rigid and afford little or no mobility to any bound compound. These resins are relatively cheap and have high specific loadings but will give very poor spectra even in a MAS probe. We see little point in running spectra of compounds on these resins as the quality of the spectra make them virtually useless - and perhaps worse - potentially misleading. 

For some polymers, like polystyrene or poly(methyl methacrylate), narrow standards of known molar mass and small polydispersity are commercially available, which can be used for calibration. Unfortunately, such standards are not available for all polymers and then the obtained true molar masses of a specific polymer might differ by a factor of two from the value obtained by calibration with, e.g., polystyrene [30] (see Section 9.1). This problem can be resolved by the so-called universal calibration, which is based on the finding that the retention volume of a polymer is a single-valued function of the hydrodynamic volume of the polymer, irrespective of its chemical nature and... 

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