Crystalline-amorphous structures contributing factors

Polymers don t behave like the atoms or compounds that have been described in the previous sections. We saw in Chapter 1 that their crystalline structure is different from that of metals and ceramics, and we know that they can, in many cases, form amorphous structures just as easily as they crystallize. In addition, unlike metals and ceramics, whose thermodynamics can be adequately described in most cases with theories of mixing and compound formation, the thermodynamics of polymers involves solution thermodynamics—that is, the behavior of the polymer molecules in a liquid solvent. These factors contribute to a thermodynamic approach to describing polymer systems that is necessarily different from that for simple mixtures of metals and compounds. Rest assured that free energy will play an important role in these discussions, just as it has in previous sections, but we are now dealing with highly inhomogeneous systems that will require some new parameters. 

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