Prediction of monomer reactivity ratios in radical copolymerization of vinyl monomers

Quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) models are developed to predict monomer reactivity ratios (log r(12)) in radical copolymerization with monomers M-1 (styrene, methyl methacrylate and acrylonitrile) and M-2 (vinyl monomers). The quantum chemical descriptors are calculated by the density functional theory (DFT) at B3LYP level of theory with 6-31G(d) basis set. Stepwise multiple linear regression analysis and artificial neural network (ANN) were used to generate Model S (monomer 1: styrene), Model MM (monomer 1: methyl methacrylate) and Model A (monomer 1: acrylonitrile). Simulation results show that the predicted log r12 values are in good agreement with the experimental data, with the test sets possessing correlation coefficients of 0.972 for Model S, 0.933 for Model MM and 0.946 for Model A.