Polymers are formed from a wide variety of organic compounds. Further, they are employed in many commercial application's, some of which have very specific requirements. For example, some uses demand polymer materials of extremely high purity, or within a narrow molecular weight range. Other applications, such as many industrial uses, employ polymers as reactants for further conversion to compositions having particular mechanical properties.
However, polymerization reactions typically are difficult to control. Even at constant reaction conditions, resulting polymers commonly have broad ranges of molecular weight. Further, during polymerization, polymer chains can undergo chain transfer and side reactions. These polymer products consequently have a molecular structure which can allow the physical properties of the material to be manipulated, such as by application of heat, or by mechanical force, but which limit the potential of the polymer as a reactant for production of related compounds.
One attempt to control the molecular weight ranges and molecular structure of polymers has been to employ living polymerizations. These are polymerizations which include propogation reactions and proceed with the absence of termination and chain transfer. As a consequence, living polymerizations generally yield polymers with well defined structure, controlled molecular weight, and narrow molecular weight distribution.
However, polymers formed by known methods of carbocationic living polymerization generally require several additional steps of chemical processing before they are suitable as reactants in production of specialty chemicals. For example, telechelic polymers which include at least one boron-containing end group are commonly employed as reactants because the boron component can make the end-groups the preferred functional group in subsequent reactions. However, polymers formed by living polymerization must go through several reaction steps following polymerization in order to obtain a polymer composition which includes the boron-containing end group. The additional reaction steps can significantly reduce reactant quality and can deleteriously affect ultimate product yield.
Therefore, a need exists for a polymer composition and a method of forming such polymer compositions which reduce or eliminate the above-mentioned problems.