ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the reaction engineering of chain-growth polymerization. In the study of copolymers, the quantities of practical interest are the relative distributions of the monomers on polymer chains and the overall rates of copolymerization. In practice, the choice of monomers for copolymerization should be such that all of them will respond to the catalyst system used for copolymerization. With increasing industrialization, the production of polymeric materials has been on the rise. Monomers have been recovered from speciality polymers such as polymethyl methacrylate, polystyrene, and polytetrafluoroethylene. Most of the chemical recycling processes rely heavily upon the depolymerization of polymers at higher temperatures. Polymer degradation is an old subject and was studied mainly because people wanted to know the limiting factor in different environments. Thermal degradation as a technique was also utilized to determine the molecular structure of copolymers, but it has gained considerable importance because of the recycling of polymers.
