Tuesday, February 19, 2019

organic chemistry - How long does a linear hydrocarbon chain have to be before we call it polyethylene?


Might be a really silly question here but here goes. Polyethylene is a polymer with a repeating unit of just 2 carbon atoms attacked to 2 hydrogens each which connect to other repeat units.


This structure is just an aliphatic hydrocarbon like butane or hexane or decane etc. My question is, at what carbon chain length does a hydrocarbon cease to be a normal alkane but instead becomes a polymer?




No comments:

Post a Comment

digital communications - Understanding the Matched Filter

I have a question about matched filtering. Does the matched filter maximise the SNR at the moment of decision only? As far as I understand, ...