Effect of oxygen on the polymerization of acrylamide

Oxygen commonly plays a vital role during the degradation and polymerization of vinyl compounds. While many studies have been done in the former case, there are only a few reports on its role in the latter case. Under suitable conditions, oxygen interacts with polymers to form hydroperoxides and poyperoxides. ' However, it may also affect the homopolymeri-zations of various vinyl monomers. Oxygen has been found to affect homopolymerizatiop in various ways; acceleration, retardation, and no effect all have been rep~rted.~- ~ The precise role of oxygen, therefore, is not clearly understood. In most of the studies quoted above, polymerization takes a few minutes to several hours. The use of thermoanalytical techniques for studying polymerization is well known and, depending upon the heating rate, the poly-merization may be completed within a desired span of time. We now report the effect of oxygen atmosphere on the polymerization of acrylamide at a heating rate of 2O"C/min 80 that polymerization is completed within 5 min after melting. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) has been used in the present investigation.'O Poly-merization was camed out in nitrogen and oxygen atmospheres; the gas was passed for about 45 min in the DSC cell before starting the experiment to ensure the creation of the desired