1. Polymers as "process products

1.1 Polymer specificities

A polymer is made up of a set of macromolecules comprising several thousand atoms linked together by covalent bonds. The structure of macromolecules can be described as consisting of the concatenation (via covalent bonds) of certain groups of atoms (called repeating units) which repeat themselves many times over (between a few tens and a few tens of thousands). Macromolecules can be linear, branched or even cross-linked. A polymer can therefore be likened to a population of macromolecules differing in their chemical characteristics (nature and number of repeating units, branching, etc.) and which can be considered to cover a range of values. Consequently, polymers are products with distributed characteristics. This distribution of structural characteristics...