Kinetics of methyl methacrylate and n‐butyl acrylate copolymerization mediated by 2‐cyanoprop‐2‐yl dithiobenzoate as a RAFT agent

Abstract The RAFT (co)polymerization kinetics of methyl methacrylate (MMA) and n ‐butyl acrylate (BA) mediated by 2‐cyanoprop‐2‐yl dithiobenzoate was studied with various RAFT concentrations and monomer compositions. The homopolymerization of MMA gave the highest rate. Increasing the BA fraction f BA dramatically decreased the copolymerization rate. The rate reached the lowest point at f MMA ∼ 0.2. This observation is in sharp contrast to the …