Chain length determination, small

The least sophisticated but most convenient technique illustrating polymer fractionation is fractional precipitation, which is dependent on the slight change in the solubility parameter with molecular weight. Thus, when a small amount of miscible nonsolvent is added to a polymer solution at a constant temperature, the product with the highest molecular weight precipitates. This procedure may be repeated after the precipitate is removed. These fractions may also be redissolved and fractionally precipitated. The shape of the distribution curve is then constructed from the fractional amount of each sample after chain length determination. 

The characteristic ratio of the poly(methylene) chain, which might be considered to be the simplest polymer molecule, as a function of chain length is shown in Fig. 4.4 for the simple models considered thus far. All save the simple freely jointed chain display end effects, manifest by an increase in Ci with chain length at small n, which will not be considered further. In what follows, only the asymptotic limit of the characteristic ratio for 00 (Coo) will be discussed. The values of for the freely jointed chain, the freely rotating chain and the chain with independent bond rotational potentials increase in value from 1 through 2 to ca 3-5. The latter value is, however, only ca one-half of the experimentally determined value of Coo=6-9 for poly(methylene). This serious discrepancy points to the fact that the bond rotational potentials are definitely not independent, i.e. the conformation of bond i depends upon the conformations of bonds (/—I) and (/-i-1). 

Maniatis T, Jeffrey A, Van de Sande H (1975) Chain length determination of small double and single stranded DNA molecules by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Biochemistry 14 3787-3794... 

While many data are suggestive of chain length dependence, the data are not usually suitable for or have not been tested with respect to model discrimination. Values of ,u have been determined for a variety of small monomeric radicals to be ca I09 M s 1.4 Taking kt0 as Jk,lj and a as 1.0 in the geometric expression yields values of ,iJ as shown in Figure 5.4a.49 Use of the Smoluchowski mean or the harmonic mean approximation prediets a shallower dependence of k 1 on the chain length (Figure 5.4b). All expressions yield the same dependence for j=i. 

The next problem is to find an expression for Asg. This entropy difference is a function of the particle volume fractions in the dispersion ( ) and in the floe (<(> ). As a first approximation, we assume that Ass is independent of the concentration and chain length of free polymer. This assumption is not necessarily true the floe structure, and thus < >f, may depend on the latter parameters because also the solvent chemical potential in the solution (affected by the presence of polymer) should be the same as that in the floe phase (determined by the high particle concentration). However, we assume that these effects will be small, and we take as a constant. 

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