Kinetics of Crosslinking Vinyl Polymerization

摘要

Bulk free-radical polymerization of a reaction mixture containing monovinyl and divinyl monomers is strongly affected by the gel effect. A model based on diffusion-controlled mechanisms is developed to describe the curing kinetics. At very high conversion the propagation reaction becomes diffusion limited and this can be used to explain the often observed limiting conversion. Experimental data available in the literature are used to assess the proposed model. Reasonable agreement between the model predictions and conversion-vs-time data is observed.