Inherent viscosity

In polymer science, inherent viscosity is the ratio of the natural logarithm of the relative viscosity of a polymer to its mass concentration.

[1] Inherent viscosity scales inversely to mass density, and a common unit is dL/g.

Inherent viscosity is defined as [2]

is the mass concentration of the polymer and

is the relative viscosity, which is defined as

is a finite difference approximation to the derivative

d ( ln ⁡ ( η ) )

That ideal limiting value is the intrinsic viscosity,[3][4] which is a good measure of the polymerization degree.

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