CHAPTER 1 – POLYMER PROPERTIES

Publisher Summary The design of manufacturing and processing equipment of polymeric substances requires a considerable knowledge of the processed materials and related compounds. The continuous development of the modern process industries has made it increasingly important to have information about the properties of materials, including many new chemical substances whose physical properties have never been measured experimentally. There are thousands of chemical compounds of interest in science and practice; however, the number of structural and functional groups that constitute all these compounds is very much smaller. The assumption that a physical property of a compound, e.g., a polymer, is in some way determined by a sum of contributions made by the structural and functional groups in the molecule or in the repeating unit of the polymer forms the basis of a method for estimating and correlating the properties of a very large number of compounds or polymers.