Weak base Wetting

BOX 4.7 Determination of Strong and Weak Base Wet Volume Capacity of an Anion Exchange Resin... 

Ion-exchange resins swell in water to an extent which depends on the amount of crosslinking in the polymer, so that columns should be prepared from the wet material by adding it as a suspension in water to a tube already partially filled with water. (This also avoids trapping air bubbles.) The exchange capacity of a resin is commonly expressed as mg equiv./mL of wet resin. This quantity is pH-dependent for weak-acid or weak-base resins but is constant at about 0.6-2 for most strong-acid or strong-base types. 

The study of acid-base interaction is an important branch of interfacial science. These interactions are widely exploited in several practical applications such as adhesion and adsorption processes. Most of the current studies in this area are based on calorimetric studies or wetting measurements or peel test measurements. While these studies have been instrumental in the understanding of these interfacial interactions, to a certain extent the interpretation of the results of these studies has been largely empirical. The recent advances in the theory and experiments of contact mechanics could be potentially employed to better understand and measure the molecular level acid-base interactions. One of the following two experimental procedures could be utilized (1) Polymers with different levels of acidic and basic chemical constitution can be coated on to elastomeric caps, as described in Section 4.2.1, and the adhesion between these layers can be measured using the JKR technique and Eqs. 11 or 30 as appropriate. For example, poly(p-amino styrene) and poly(p-hydroxy carbonyl styrene) can be coated on to PDMS-ox, and be used as acidic and basic surfaces, respectively, to study the acid-base interactions. (2) Another approach is to graft acidic or basic macromers onto a weakly crosslinked polyisoprene or polybutadiene elastomeric networks, and use these elastomeric networks in the JKR studies as described in Section 4.2.1. 

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