6. Chemical modification of polymers

It involves a change in the nature of the reactive groups carried by each unit of a chain (see the Polymerization dossier [J 5 830] ). The reaction mechanisms of these transformations are, in general, quite similar to those of classical organic chemistry, but an essential feature of the chemical transformation of polymers is the topochemical aspect of these reactions. If we represent by A the functional group carried by the chain which, reacting with B, transforms into the functional group C, we can write :