Smoluchowski's coagulation equations can be used as elementary mathematical models for the formation of polymers. We review here some recent contributions on a variation of this model in which the number of aggregations for each atom is a priori limited. Macroscopic results in the deterministic setting can be explained at the microscopic level by considering a version of stochastic coalescence with limited aggregations, which can be related to the so-called random configuration model of random graph theory.
