Study Of Reverse Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization Of Methyl Methacrylate And Styrene

Reverse atom transfer radical polymerization (RATRP) developed in1995by Matyjaszewiks, which provides a new efficient way to conduct living/controlled polymerization. However, there are a few disadvantages which restrict the use of ATRP, such as low catalytic activity of ATRP, large catalyst dosage, expensive ligands. Besides, it is bad for environment, metal catalyst for moisture or oxygen is very sensitive, most solvent of polymerization is toxic. At the same time, RATRP attracts the polymer researchers’ eyes with its unique advantages which overcome the shortcomings in ATRP method, for instance, high toxicity of alkyl hydrocarbon halogenated initiator, easy oxidation of low state transition metal.In this paper, we have separately studied precipitation polymerizations of methyl methacrylate (MMA) and styrene (St) by Reverse atom transfer radical precipitation polymerization (RATRP) which is protected by nitrogen with cuprous chloride/PMDETA and cupric chloride/DMP-30as catalyst initiated by AIBN in ethanol solution. Through the gel permeation chromatography confirmed that MMA and St can synthesize such polymers with low molecular weight distribution by this two kinds of catalyst system. The effects of reaction time, initiator concentration, monomer concentration and ligand concentration on the system show that polymerization rate and monomer concentration obey the first order dynamics, the average molecular weight and the conversion obey a good linear growth. The reaction process is controlled.