ABSTRACT
A polymer, especially a synthetic polymer, is a large molecule built up by the repetition of small, simple chemical units. The repeating units of the polymer are usually equivalent to the monomer or the starting material composing the polymer. The length of the polymer chain is specified by the number of the repeating units in the chain, which is called the degree of polymerization. The molecular weight (MW) of the polymer is the product of the MW of the repeating unit and the degree of polymerization. A synthetic polymer contains molecules having many different chain lengths and, unlike many small molecules and biopolymers, it has a distribution of the different chain lengths (the different MW). A biopolymer, such as protein, is an assembly of several amino acids connected by peptide linkage and consists of molecules having the same chain length (the same MW).
