ON THE FLUID LATTICE AND GIBBS-DIMARZIO THEORIES

This paper is concerned with the 'fluid lattice' theories of polymeric fluids. Variations of these theories have proven to be successful for the reduction of experimental data of different equilibrium properties of gases, liquids, and their mixtures. On the other hand, in spite of its shortcoming the Gibbs-Di Marzio theory may be considered as one of the best treatments of the glass transition phenomenon. The authors combine Gibbs-Di Marzio's suggestion of zero configurational entropy at the glass transition temperature with the simpler approximation of Flory for the partition function of semiflexible chain molecules. It is shown that this simple form of the partition function, when properly implemented, gives results that are qualitatively similar to those of the Gibbs-Di Marzio theory.