I want to do some RAFT polymerizations but don't have a nitrogen line at the moment. It seems that people have recently implemented oxygen scavenging strategies to enable open-air RAFT polymerization. In Ref. 1-4 and many similar references, people have used ascorbic acid or trithiocarbonate/blue light as the scavenger and transfer the scavenged electrons to photocatalysts to act as the initiator for polymerization. My question is, can I add ascorbic acid + copper or ferrous iron to a reaction mixture to serve as oxygen scavengers and separately just use AIBN as a radical initiator instead of the photocatalysts?
(1) Zhang, T.; Yeow J.; Boyer, C. A cocktail of vitamins for aqueous RAFT polymerization in an open-to-air microtiter plate. Polym. Chem. 2019, 10, 4643-4654. DOI 10.1039/C9PY00898E.
(2) Yeow, J.; Chapman, R.; Xu, J.; Boyer, C. Oxygen tolerant photopolymerization for ultralow volumes. Polym. Chem. 2017, 8, 5012-5022. DOI 10.1039/C7PY00007C
(3) Shanmugam, S.; Xu, J.; Boyer, C. Aqueous RAFT Photopolymerization with Oxygen Tolerance. Macromolecules 2016, 49, 9345-9357. DOI 10.1021/acs.macromol.6b02060
(4) Fu, Q.; Xie, K.; McKenzie, T. G.; Qiao, G. G. Trithiocarbonates as intrinsic photoredox catalysts and RAFT agents for oxygen tolerant controlled radical polymerization. Polym. Chem. 2017, 8, 1519-1526. DOI 10.1039/C6PY01994C
