Thomas Swan & Co. Ltd Custom Manufacture division offer a RAFT of chemistries

North-East England-based Thomas Swan & Co. Ltd. today announced that its Custom Manufacture Division have expanded its capabilities to include RAFT (reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer) polymerisations.

With many years of experience in the manufacture of a wide range of polymers and the modification of polymer intermediates, the company are now able to include RAFT polymerisations in the wide range of polymerisation services they provide.

Tom Porter, Business Director – Custom Manufacture at Thomas Swan, said: “We are delighted to announce that we are able to expand our polymerisation offering to the marketplace with this exciting technology. RAFT technology helps us to control the architecture of a polymer to help develop and deliver polymers with a higher degree of complexity in a controlled manner. This versatile manufacturing method assists us in answering the increasing requirement for highly functional complex polymeric architectures and the global requirements for sustainable chemicals and processes.

Since its first report in 1998, the RAFT process has grown into one of the most versatile and powerful polymerisation techniques for the synthesis of complex polymeric architectures.

RAFT is a reversible deactivation radical polymerisation (RDRP), also known as living or controlled radical polymerisation—a process that mimics closely the feature of living polymerisation while benefiting from the versatility of a radical process.

The past 20 years have witnessed a rapidly growing interest in RAFT polymerisation and the process is now a widely recognized polymerisation technique, adopted by the wider scientific community and beyond polymer synthesis laboratories, as a tool to generate materials for a broad range of applications from materials science to medicine.