Poly(acrylates) via SET-LRP in a continuous tubular reactor

A simple, easy to construct, bench-top plug flow reactor consisting of PTFE tubing with a Cu(0) threaded core (wire) was used to perform SET-LRP of methyl acrylate. The reaction was optimized by changing the residence time within the flow reactor. Both changing the flow reactor length and changing the flow rate was seen to control the resultant polymer molecular weight. Using a 20 cm reactor length, 95% conversion of monomer was seen at a flow rate of 0.1 mL min−1. The polymers formed had narrow molecular weight distributions (PDI< 1.2), and very high ω-chain end fidelity, as seen by both 1H NMR and MALDI-TOF MS.