Introduction

This chapter is concerned primarily, in section 3.3, with factors that determine the shapes that individual polymer molecules can take up, both on the local scale of a few repeat units and on the scale of the complete molecule. It is shown that, if a polymer molecule is in a particular kind of solution or in a melt of like molecules, its most likely state is a so-called random coil with a statistically well-defined size. This coil has an open structure that can be penetrated by chain segments belonging to other coils, so that the chains in a molten polymer are likely to be highly overlapping, or entangled, if the molar mass is high. In addition, as discussed in the following section, the molecules do not all have the same length. At first sight these two factors appear to make it unlikely that a polymer could crystallise on cooling, so that it might be expected that polymer solids would be rather structureless. However, in section 3.4 experimental evidence showing that this is not necessarily so is presented and the various ordered structures are discussed further in subsequent chapters.

Distributions of molar mass and their determination

In section 1.3.1 it is pointed out that polymers, unlike other chemical compounds, do not have fixed molar masses. The molar masses are very high and there is a distribution of molar masses, or chain lengths, that depends on the polymerisation conditions.