Comparison of methods for the determination of diffusion coefficients of polymers in dilute solutions: The influence of polydispersity

Abstract

A comparison between various methods to determine diffusion coefficients of polymers in dilute solutions has been made. It is shown that Taylor dispersion analysis (TDA), dynamic light scattering (DLS), hydrodynamic chromatography (HDC), and size exclusion chromatography (SEC) can all be used to accurately determine diffusion coefficients when the polymer samples have low polydispersities. By the analysis of a series of practically representative styrene acrylonitrile copolymer (SAN) samples, it is shown that polydispersity of the samples and the presence of low-molecular-mass material cause considerable differences between the methods. It was found that TDA is mostly disturbed by the presence of low-molecular-mass material, whereas DLS is more sensitive to the polydispersity of the polymer. With broad samples, DLS gives the Z-average diffusion coefficient. SEC can be used to obtain a diffusion coefficient distribution as well as an average diffusion coefficient of a polydisperse sample. Although, the same was expected for HDC, it was found that this method could only be successfully used for polymer samples having low polydispersities. Deviations between SEC, HDC, and TDA found for narrow samples were not related to the chemical composition of the samples.