Experiment 37. Intrinsic Viscosity: Chain Linkage in Polyvinyl Alcohol

While the basic chemical structure of a synthetic high polymer is usually well understood, many physical properties depend on such characteristics as chain length, degree of chain branching, and molecular weight, which are not easy to specify exactly in terms of a molecular formula. Moreover, the macromolecules in a given sample are seldom uniform in chain length or molecular weight (which for a linear polymer is proportional to chain length); thus, the nature of the distribution of molecular weights is another important characteristic.