Copolymerization as a Markov Chain

Abstract

The concept of Markov chains has been employed to derive the degree-of-polymerization distribution, the over-all composition, and the compositional distribution for copolymers containing any number of different monomers. The results are then used to obtain explicit expressions for systems of two monomers. It is shown that this method, because of its conciseness and ease of generalization, is particularly well adapted for problems in copolymerization statistics.