Summary and Final Tasks

With this lesson, we conclude our in-depth discussion of the general mechanism and kinetics of chain polymerization. Hopefully, you feel comfortable with the similarities and differences between ionic and free radical polymerizations. The monomers and reactions you learned in these last three lessons (4 to 6) are very important and will be revisited many times during the rest of the course. Next, we address some of the intricacies of chain growth polymerization we somewhat ignored previously; for example, what about stereochemical considerations of monomers and polymers, or what happens if the monomer is conjugated and the active center has resonance? We will also briefly touch on a specialized class of monomers which exist in ring form and how they can be used in ring opening polymerization (a special case of chain growth).