RAFT-based Polystyrene and Polyacrylate Melts under Thermal and Mechanical Stress

Abstract

Although controlled/living radical polymerization processes have significantly facilitated the synthesis of well-defined low polydispersity polymers with specific functionalities, a detailed and systematic knowledge of the thermal stability of the products–highly important for most industrial processes–is not available. Linear polystyrene (PS) carrying a trithiocarbonate mid-chain functionality (thus emulating the structure of the Z-group approach via reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) based macromolecular architectures) with various chain lengths (20 kDa ≤ Mn,SEC ≤ 150 kDa, 1.27 ≤ Đ = Mw/Mn ≤ 1.72) and chain-end functionality were synthesized via RAFT polymerization. The thermal stability behavior of the polymers was studied at temperatures ranging from 100 to 200 °C for up to 504 h (3 weeks). The thermally treated polymers were analyzed via size exclusion chromatography (SEC) to obtain the dependence of the polymer molecular weight distribution on time at a specific temperature unde...