Synthesis of Polymers
This MIT OpenCourseWare course examines how polymeric materials are made, connecting chemical pathway, process condition, and the resulting molecular microarchitecture. Chemical pathways covered include anionic polymerization, radical condensation, and ring-opening polymerization, along with more specialized techniques like stable free radical polymerization and atom transfer radical polymerization, catalytic routes to well-defined architectures, and surface or bulk polymer functionalization. Process conditions studied include bulk, solution, emulsion, suspension, and gas-phase systems, as well as batch versus continuous fluidized-bed operation. On the microarchitecture side, the course addresses tacticity, molecular-weight distribution, copolymer sequence distribution, and chain defects such as branching, head-to-head addition, and peroxide incorporation. Course materials come from MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering and are freely available through MIT OpenCourseWare, including lecture materials prepared for the course site, with no certificate offered.