A high molecular weight polymer molecule usually contains thousands, hundreds of thousands or even several million atoms.
It refers to a high molecular weight (usually up to 104-106) compound that is formed with many repeating structural units connected with covalent bonds. For example, a polyvinyl chloride molecule is formed by repeatedly connecting many vinyl chloride molecular structural units (CH2CHCl), so CH2CHCl is also known as the structural unit or chain knot. A compound composed of small molecules that can form structural units is called a monomer, which is the raw material for synthetic polymers. n represents the number of repeated units, also known as the degree of polymerization, which is an important indicator for measuring the high molecular polymer. A polymer with the very low degree of polymerization (1-100) is called an oligomer, and only when the molecular weight is up to 10-106 (such as plastics, rubber, fibers, etc.), it is called a high-molecular polymer. A polymer formed through polymerization of one monomer is called a homopolymer, such as the aforementioned polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene. A polymer formed through copolymerization of two or more monomers is called a copolymer, such as the vinyl chloride-vinyl acetate copolymer.
