Tailor-made Polymers by Living Polymerization - Optimization

5 Tailor-made Polymers by Living Polymerization - Optimization 

Anionic living polymerization offers a unique opportunity for tailor-made polymers because all the chains and their living ends are accessible throughout the course of the reaction. In general, there are two important tasks in tailoring polymers one concerns their chemical distribution and the other the molecular weight distribution. 

The structure of copolymers in terms of composition or sequence length distribution may vary between two extremes - copolymers with a very high level of chemical heterogeneity within each chain, and homogeneous copolymers with the comonomer units randomly distributed along the chain. 

The optimal production of tri-block copolymers in a series of CSTRs, where the reactors are operated in an isokinetic way, is described in Ref. 130. 

To produce a copolymer with a more random structure in spite of the extreme values of the copolymerization parameters, there are several possibilities. One is 

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