Reassessment of Free-Radical Polymerization Mechanism of Allyl Acetate Based on End-Group Determination of Resulting Oligomers by MALDI-TOF-MS Spectrometry

Allyl monomers polymerize only with difficulty and yield polymers of medium-molecular-weight or oligomers. This is attributable to “degradative monomer chain transfer.” However, the well-known allyl polymerization mechanism is based on only the kinetic data but any structural identification is not given. Allyl acetate (AAc), a most typical allyl monomer, was polymerized radically and the resultant oligomeric poly(AAc)s were characterized using MALDI-TOF-MS spectrometry in order to reassess the AAc polymerization mechanism proposed by Litt and Eirich. The induced decomposition of benzoyl peroxide by both growing polymer radical and monomeric allyl radical was presumed but it was never of importance. Then, the fate of resonance-stabilized monomeric allyl radical generated via monomer chain transfer of growing polymer radical was pursued in terms of the competition between the initiation of a new polymer chain and the chain stopping reaction of a growing polymer radical providing monomeric allyl groups as the initial and terminal end-groups, respectively. The monomer chain transfer constant was estimated to be 3.73 × 10 −2 from the P n value of poly(AAc) obtained at a low initiator concentration where the coupling termination of growing polymer radical with monomeric allyl radical was negligible.