A Preliminary Study of the Relationship between Lewis Acid–Base Parameters and Structure of Polymers

Abstract

Acid–base theory is an important method to describe the interaction between materials. The inverse gas chromatography (IGC) technique can be used to measure the surface Lewis acid–base parameters of materials. Compared with the solubility parameter method, the merit of the IGC technique is that it can give the surface acid–base properties of many undissolvable materials, such as inorganic materials, metal‐oxides, and thermosetting polymers. In this paper, six polymers are chosen to discuss the rationality of their Lewis acid–base parameters from the molecular structure viewpoint. Compared with some small molecules, the values of these polymers are reasonable. However, endowing each group with a set of acid–base parameters is impossible at this stage because of the lack of sufficient data. Thus more characterization work is needed to develop the IGC method.