| Abstract: | Kinetics of end‐group interchange reaction in a homopolymer melt is studied in theory. The relaxation of the molecular weight distribution to its most probable (Flory) stationary form is considered. To this end, the time‐dependent generating function of the transient distribution is calculated analytically. Peculiarities of the relaxation process are investigated for two types of the initial distribution, namely, the sum of two Flory distributions with different number averages N1 and N2, and the delta‐function. In each case, the dependencies of the differential molecular weight distribution and the weight‐ and z‐average polymerization degrees on the number of interchanges per end group are obtained in the explicit form. The reaction kinetics is compared with that of direct interchange studied in preceding work. |
