Evaporative purification to produce highly monodisperse polymers: Application to polystyrene for n=3–13 and quantification of Tg from oligomer to polymer

We demonstrate the use of selective thermal evaporation to separate and purify small molecular weight polymers into highly monodisperse polymers over an extended range of polymerization index. By exploiting the calculated dependence of polymer vapor pressure on polymerization index N and temperature T, we can isolate individual components (N-mers) of an initially polydisperse mixture. To demonstrate this ability, we consider polystyrene samples …