Low‐Temperature, Rapid Copolymerization of Acrylic Acid and Sodium Acrylate in Water

Abstract

Regulating the aqueous polymerization of acrylic acid (AA) is a major opportunity for future materials design, requiring the development of scalable, industry‐oriented procedures that afford modest molar mass and dispersity control without long reaction times and environmentally demanding conditions. To address these challenges, this report presents the rapid copolymerization of aqueous mixtures of AA and sodium acrylate using an inexpensive and scalable protocol based on alkyl iodides/sodium iodide as mediators in water. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part A: Polym. Chem. 2019, 57, 1414–1419

Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization of Acrylic and Methacrylic Acids: Preparation of Acidic Polymers with Various Architectures

“…However, only a few reports address the controlled polymerization of acidic monomers and particularly AA. Nitroxide mediated polymerization (NMP), , reversible addition–fragmentation chain-transfer (RAFT) polymerization, − reverse iodine transfer polymerization (RITP), and other techniques − provided moderately controllable PAA synthesis, yet required high temperatures, long reaction times, and/or expensive and not readily available catalytic or chain-transfer systems. Thus, the most common way to prepare well-defined PAA is via RDRP of tert -butyl acrylate followed by deprotection of the tert -butyl group. − The development of a procedure to prepare well-defined homo- and copolymers of AA with commercially available materials under mild conditions remains highly desirable.…”