The Radical Ring-Opening Polymerization of Cyclic Ketene Acetals Revisited: An Experimental and Theoretical Study

Radical Ring-Opening polymerization (rROP) of Cyclic Ketene Acetals (CKAs) combines the advantages of both ring-opening and radical polymerization thereby allowing the robust production of polyesters. In this article we investigate in detail the radical ring-opening polymerization of model CKA monomers and demonstrate by the combination of DFT calculations and kinetic modeling using PREDICI software that we are now able to predict in silico the ring-opening ability of CKA monomers