Abstract: Reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization is one of the controlled/living free radical polymerization techniques. CLRP combines the advantages of conventional free radical polymerization and living ionic polymerization. The ‘living’ nature of CLRP gives individual chains a time period of hours to grow and allows us to control chain microstructure by engineering means. It will be critically important in theoretical and application areas by developing a model-based semi-batch monomer feeding policy to tailor-make copolymer chain structure via CLRP.
In this paper, we synthesized a kind of RAFT agent----benzyl dithioisobutyrate (BDIB) and investigated the kinetic behavior of St/BA copolymerization mediated by BDIB. The results of the experiments show that BDIB can well control the styrene (St)/butyl acrylate (BA) copolymerization. Furthermore, with these experimental data, the adjusted parameters in the kinetic model are optimized. Thus, the model predictions are in a good agreement with the experimental data in polymerization rate. This will help us to precisely control the chain structure through semi-batch operation.
