Treatment of Intrinsic Viscosity Data

Mark-Houwink Equation Staudinger (1932) suggested that the molecular weight M of polymers is proportional to the reduced viscosity  

Equation (8.21) describes the relationship between viscosity and molecular weight. Since molecular weight is related to the size of the polymer chain, Eq. (8.21) also describes the relationship between [q] and N (the number of links in a polymer chain) or [q] and (R ) (the mean-square end-to-end distance). This has stimulated a great deal, interest over the last 40 years as to how they are related. More specifically, what are the meaning of K and a  

Flory-Fox Equation As mentioned earlier, at the 0 temperature there are only short-range steiic interactions between neighboring or near-neighboring polymer segments. The polymer molecule shrinks to a compact form. Flory and 

Fox (1951) suggestsd that the intrinsic viscosity at 0 the condition may be regarded as measure of the ratio of the effective hydrodynamic volume of the polymer to its molecular weight M. They took the radius of hydrodynamic volume as the root-mean-square end-to-end distance in the random coil  

The proportionality constant is a universal constant, called the Flory viscosity constant. Thus, Flory and Fox provided, partially, the meanings of K and a in the Mark-Houwink equation. At the 0 temperature, K is defined by Eq. (8.23) and 

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