CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Copolymers are often characterized in terms of the overall molecular weight distribution, average molecular weights and average composition. These variables, however, do not consider the copolymer composition at a molecular level. One of the quantities that are related to the chain microstructure is the sequence length distribution (SLD). The SLD indicates the lengths of thesequences of each kind of monomer along the copolymer chains. It is well known that product quality can be strongly dependent on this property in several cases. For instance, the SLD may affect the miscibility of different copolymers. Large sequences of a monomer in a copolymercan also lead to microphase separation . Moreover, the SLD affects the mechanical properties of microheterogeneous composites by influencing the material micromorphology. Different approaches have been reported in the literature for the prediction of the SLD. They are based on probabilistic methods, Monte Carlo simulations and kinetic modeling . However, the latter is the least common of the three, in particular for relatively novel polymerization processes such as the one studied in this work. Living radical, or controlled, polymerization has become an attractive alternative for synthesizing polymers with controlled structure. In another work in this Symposium, we presented a mathematical model of a nitroxide-mediated living radical copolymerization in tubular reactors. In that work, the techniques employed for predicting the overall copolymer MWD, average compositions, average molecular weights and monomer conversion as a function of reactor length were explained. On the other hand, this work is focused on describing the method employed in the model for computing the copolymer SLD

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