A process was developed to prepare a key intermediate in the pilot plant scale (2 kg / 60 L). This new process substituted a known process, which was found to be unreliable with low yield and had produced large amounts of toxic by-products. A second key compound was obtained safely with a yield less than 90% at 98% purity, but found to be critical in storage and shipping. The Wessling monomer could be made reproducibly and is stable to be stored and shipped. The processes studied to make the sulfoxy monomer were kept on laboratory scale.
The Wessling polymerization was developed into a routine method, which allows preparing enough precursor polymer for running the pilot line continuously for one week from one batch. This process was found to be quite sensitive to a lot of parameters and has its limitations. Storage stability was raised considerably by the achieved high purity levels, but seems to be still an issue if larger scales are planned.