The preparation of a variety of lactone and olefin homopolymers and their copolymers using alkyl aluminoxanes and soluble Ziegler-Natta catalysts was studied. After investigation of a variety of soluble Ziegler-Natta cocatalyst and alkyl-aluminoxanes, either bis(cyclopentadienyl)zirconium dichloride, Cp$\sb2$ZrCl$\sb2$, or ethylene bis(tetrahydroindenyl)zirconium dichloride, Et(ThInd)$\sb2$ZrCl$\sb2$, with isobutylaluminoxane, IBAO, were found to be very effective for the copolymerizations, so these catalyst systems were used throughout this thesis research program. In order to vary the type of functionality and biodegradability, the possible copolymerization of lactones (including $\beta$-butyrolactone ($\beta$-BL), $\varepsilon$-caprolactone (CL), $\gamma$-butyrolactone ($\gamma$-BL), and DL-lactide (DL-L)) and olefin containing monomers (including styrene (S), methyl methacrylate (MMA) and ethyl acrylate (EA)) were studied. Many of these copolymers were synthesized for the first time in this study. The characterization results showed that some of these copolymers had high molecular weights, narrow polydispersities, unimodal GPC chromatograms and single values of glass transition temperatures (T$\sb{\rm g}$), and they were also totally amorphous. These results indicate that they were true copolymers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-2692 |
| Date | 01 January 1993 |
| Creators | Yang, John Po-Wen |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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