Introduction

Abstract

Polymers are highly complex multicomponent materials. Properties typically considered important to polymer performance in products may be very diverse and can be divided into simple and distributed properties. Simple properties are the total weight of polymer present, the residual monomer or oligomer content, total weight of microgels or aggregates, and properties that depend only on these measures, such as conversion in the polymerization reaction, monomer composition and average copolymer composition. For other properties different molecules in the same polymer will have different values of the property. These properties are termed distributed properties, the most important of them in polymer chemistry being the molar mass distribution, the distribution of compositions, the distribution of sequence lengths and the distribution of functionality.