Polycondensation

Abstract

There are many technological challenges of the twenty‐first century including energy, information, and transportation. During the continuous innovations, polycondensates have been supporting our modern life in the global society. The synthetic methodology of polycondensation allows for a wide variety of available monomers and polymer structures than any other synthetic polymerization technique, which are derived from almost infinite kinds of designing structures in monomers compared to vinyl monomers. In addition, the high performance of specially designed polycondensates (eg, high thermal, chemical, mechanical, and dimensional stability) have provided a breakthrough, especially in material science and industry, as represented by the developments of superengineering plastics, such as wholly aromatic polyamides, polyimides, poly(phenylene ether)s, poly(ether sulfone)s, poly(ether ketone)s, and poly(ether ether ketone)s. Polycondensation chemistry is also used for preparing recent optoelectronic applications including organic electroluminescence, field–effect transistors, organic solar cells, polymer memories, and so forth. This article, details the basic principles of polycondensation and recent advances in polycondensation.

Polymer Synthesis Based on Self‐Accelerating 1,3‐Dipolar Cycloaddition Click Reactions†

“…Step‐growth polymerization is one of the basic methods for synthesizing polymers. [ 47 ] Due to the wide availability of polymerization reactions and the versatility of monomer structures, step‐growth polymerization produces various functional polymers to play important roles in polymer materials, such as polyester, [ 48 ] polyamide, [ 49 ] polyimide, [ 50 ] and so on. The traditional step‐ growth polymerization methods based on the equal reactivity of functional groups, however, are hard to produce polymers with high molecular weights above 50 × 10 3 .…”

“…The traditional step‐ growth polymerization methods based on the equal reactivity of functional groups, however, are hard to produce polymers with high molecular weights above 50 × 10 3 . [ 47,51 ] The reason has been clarified by the classic Carothers‐Flory theory. [ 52 ] In the homo‐…”