Estimation of the amount of adjacent reentry in polymer crystallization. I. The basic equations

We develop a treatment of polymer chain folded crystallization in which stems are incorporated into the crystal by both adjacent and nonadjacent reentry. By defining certain stages of partial incorporation of a molecule as separate species, we have been able to adapt a kinetic transfer matrix technique derived previously to solve the problem of the growth of multicomponent chains to the solution of the present problem. A prescription is given for obtaining the relative amounts of adjacent and nonadjacent reentry as a function of the forward and backward rate constants for stem incorporation. The difficult problem of determining the rate constants as well as the actual numerical calculations are presented in a subsequent paper.