• Applied Chemistry for Engineering
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.718-725
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• 1999

In order to investigate the interaction characteristics of poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) with various solvents such as water, ethanol, and iso-propanol, Inverse Gas Chromatography(IGC) at finite concentration, which is a very fast, accurate, and thus promising technique in thermodynamic study of polymer systems, is employed. By measuring the specific retention volumes of the probes, the interaction parameters are calculated by means of the Flory-Huggins equation. From the results, the interaction parameters of the probes are, as expected due to the hydrophobicity of the polymer, found to be of large positive values (2$2.0{\times}10^{-3}mol/g$. For the linear PDMS, interpretation of the space distribution of molecules is performed by the Kirkwood-Buff-Zimm(KBZ) integrals, which give intuitive information about physical properties. From the KBZ integrals, water does not show the tendency of preferential solvation with the PDMS but formed self-cluster. The larger solvent molecules show a stronger tendency to distribute more randomly in the mixture.