Polymer Production With Addition Polymerization

As we stated in that article, polymer market in industry is one of the biggest material market. So, production industry that depends on polymers is also very big bazaar. In this content, we give brief information about addition polymerization, which is a one out of two processes to produce polymers below.

Take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of polymers compared with other materials.

What Is Addition Polymerization?

Addition polymerization is a special process to produce long chained polymers. In addition polymerization, there are special steps to obtain special long chained polymer groups. Starting molecules are called as ‘monomer’, which are used to obtain polymer molecules from them. To do it, bondings between carbon atoms in monomer molecules must be opened to be react with other monomer molecules. Opening carbon bondings is done by a catalyst which is called as ‘initiator’. After the addition polymerization process starts, single monomers are tied up betweem themselves to become short chained polymers. With the ‘addition’ of monomers to these short chained polymers, long-chained polymers are obtained.

All the process of addition polymerization is done in seconds. But in industrial production and large serial production of polymers, all the addition polymerization process can take minutes, even hours.

What Kinds Of Polymers Are Produced With Addition Polymerization?

In general, thermoplastics are produced with addition polymerization process. Also a polymer called as ‘polyisoprene’ is an kind of natural rubber, can be produced with addition polymerization process. In such processes, replacement of H atoms with other atoms is a special application. For example in the production of polytetrafluoroethylene, all the four H atoms that bonded to Carbon is replaced with F atoms. Polypropylene is generally used to this H atom replacement processes to obtain other kinds of polymers such as, polyvinylchloride and polystirene.

Addition polymerization and its process parameters can be summarized like above. Do not forget to leave your comments and questions about ‘addition polymerization’ below. Your feedback is very important for us.