Über hochpolymere Verbindungen, 14. Mitteilung: Über das Polystyrol, ein Modell des Kautschuks

Abstract

{IgZg)] Staudinger, Rrunner, P r e y , Garhsch, Xigner, Wehrli.

Thermolysis of polystyrene

“…The pattern of average molecular weight reduction obtained in this work is in good agreement with results reportEJd by previous workers [22,37,40,[44][45].…”

“…As expected, from previous work [22,35,42,44,46], the yield of the volatile product increased with both an increase in temperature ( [22,37,40,[43][44]46].…”

“…However, the actual molecular weigl1t reducticn in this work was greater. The final molecular weight was only 180 in this work compared to 5000 by other workers [22,37,40,[44][45]. The work of Ide et al [22] has shown that initiation of the depropagating chain reaction yielding monomer occurs both by random scission and at chain ends.…”

“…This has led to a range of yields ~nd product qualities. For example, carrying out the reaction under vacuum generated large amounts of dimer and trimer in the volatile fraction [37,40,[43][44][45]. Th3 addition of catalysts increased the variety of products obtained.…”

“…Many of these were present in low concentrations, but there was an overall decrease in molecular weight [22,30,46]. In ail the studies, both higher temperatures and longer reaction times resulted in an increase of the amount of the volatile fraction [22,30,37,40,[44][45][46][47] and a decrease in the molecular weight of the residue [22,37,[44][45]. Many of these experirnents were done with very small samples and none of them !…”