Reactivity of Monovinyl (Meth)Acrylates Containing Cyclic Carbonates

The tremendous diversity of materials properties available with polymers is due in large part to the ability to design structures from the monomeric state. The ease of use of comonomer mixtures only expands this versatility. While final polymer properties are obviously important in the selection or development of a material for a given purpose, for a number of applications, such as optical fiber coatings, photolithography and microelectronics, the additional requirement of a very rapid polymerization process may be equally critical. A class of unusually reactive mono-(meth)acrylate monomers bearing secondary functionality that includes carbonates, carbamates and oxazolidones, has been demonstrated but not fully explained. Here, the influence of an integral cyclic carbonate functional group on (meth)acrylate photopolymerization kinetics is examined in detail with respect to monomers with a wide variety of alternative secondary functionality structure as well as in comparison to conventional mono- and di-(meth)acrylates. The kinetic results from full cure studies of several cyclic carbonate-containing monomers clearly highlight specific structural variations that effectively promote monomer reactivity. Copolymerizations with tetrahydrofurfuryl methacrylate reflect similar dramatic kinetic effects associated with the novel monomers while partial cure homopolymerization studies reveal exceptional dark cure behavior linked to observations of uncommonly low ratios of termination to propagation rates throughout the conversion profile. Temperature effects on reaction kinetics, including both reaction rate and the individual kinetic parameters, as well as the temperature dependence of hydrogen bonding interactions specifically involving the secondary functional groups are probed as a means to understand better the fundamentally interesting and practically important behavior of these monomers.