Application Note: Intrinsic Viscosity Analysis of Polystyrene in Chloroform

Intrinsic viscosity is a common characterization tool for synthetic polymers in organic solvents since it provides information about the individual macromolecules in solution. It can also be related to hydrodynamic radius and molecular weight. Typical methods for determining intrinsic viscosity of these solutions are manual and/or use large sample volumes making the analysis inconvenient.

The VROC^® initium one plus can now handle organic solvent based systems as well as aqueous, thus replacing the manual/large sample volume methods for determining intrinsic viscosity of aqueous and organic systems.

In this application note we will perform an intrinsic viscosity analysis of three different molecular weight polystyrene (PS) standards and chloroform with the VROC^® initium one plus. The intrinsic viscosity extracted from the analysis was used to estimate the hydrodynamic radius of each molecular weight PS and to determine the coefficients for the Mark-Houwink-Sakurada relationship.