Summary
After this lesson, you should now feel comfortable identifying the tacticity of a polymer, describing how the tacticity impacts the polymer properties, and suggesting methods by which to control tacticity. Additionally, you should be able to draw the products of polymerization of dienes, and describe the mechanism of the various products are formed. Lastly, you now can suggest cyclic monomers to use to create polymer via ring opening polymerization, and notice how many of those polymers you can also make by step growth! Next, we move onto copolymers – where we have not just one type of monomer, but two or more. We will find that when we mix monomers, it’s likely that one monomer is more reactive (and incorporated more quickly into the polymer). How do we measure that, and determine which monomers will actually end up in the polymer? All coming soon, in Lesson 8!
Reminder - Complete all of the Lesson 7 tasks!
You have reached the end of Lesson 7! Review the checklist on the Lesson 7 Overview / Checklist page to make sure you have completed all of the activities listed there before you begin Lesson 8.