Online monitoring of chain transfer in free-radical polymerization

A recently introduced, automated method for online monitoring of polymerization reactions was used to study free-radical transfer reactions. The persulfate initiated polymerization of acrylamide (AAm) in water was chosen as the test system. Chain transfer properties of ethanol (EtOH) and propanol (PrOH) were investigated. Different methods of computing the transfer constant are compared, including those based on the slope and intercept behavior of the monitored cumulative weight-average molecular mass as a function of conversion, Mw(f), the reduced viscosity, and corresponding size exclusion chromatography analysis of the reaction end products. To a close approximation, the chain transfer agents were found to obey the form expected when ideal free-radical polymerization takes place and radical transfer from propagating radicals to the chain transfer agent (CTA) is slower than from the CTA to monomer, that is, the polymer molar mass decreases with increasing chain transfer agent but there is no appreciable effect on the kinetics of monomer conversion. The AAm kinetics were characterized in terms of the ratio kp2/kt, where and kp and kt are the propagation and termination rate constants, respectively.