ABSTRACT
A polymer molecule is composed of several repetitive units called monomers; the word “poly” means many and “mer” means unit. e term monomer means a chemical repeat unit of small molecules that are polymerized to produce a polymer. For example, a useful polymer polyethylene –CH2-CH2-CH2-CH2-CH2-or (–CH2-CH2-)n is obtained by a polymerization reaction of n number of ethylene (CH2=CH2) molecules. It is interesting to note that for n of the order of 20,000, a straight polymer chain will have a length of a few microns and a width of about 1 nm. Unlike conventional molecules, polymers will have a distribution of n, hence, the molecular weight of a polymer will be around the mean value-for this particular example, the mean molecular weight will be 280,000 g mol−1.
