Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 7, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10514
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Centre National de Recherche Scientifique
- Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award [WM130055]
- Monash-Warwick Alliance
- Australian Research Council (Future Fellowship)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Precise control over the location of monomers in a polymer chain has been described as the 'Holy Grail' of polymer synthesis. Controlled chain growth polymerization techniques have brought this goal closer, allowing the preparation of multiblock copolymers with ordered sequences of functional monomers. Such structures have promising applications ranging from medicine to materials engineering. Here we show, however, that the statistical nature of chain growth polymerization places strong limits on the control that can be obtained. We demonstrate that monomer locations are distributed according to surprisingly simple laws related to the Poisson or beta distributions. The degree of control is quantified in terms of the yield of the desired structure and the standard deviation of the appropriate distribution, allowing comparison between different synthetic techniques. This analysis establishes experimental requirements for the design of polymeric chains with controlled sequence of functionalities, which balance precise control of structure with simplicity of synthesis.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available