Influence of monomer molecular structure on the glass transition in polymers I. Lattice cluster theory for the configurational entropy

The configurational entropy Sc, which is a basic quantity in theoretical descriptions of the glass transition, is evaluated for a multicomponent polymer system using the lattice cluster theory. This theoretical treatment of Sc represents an extension of the Gibbs–DiMarzio theory to a mixture of semiflexible, interacting polymers composed of structured monomers. The extension provides a theoretical tool for investigating how the glass transition of polymer systems depends on the chemical structure of the constituent polymers. Applications of the new theoretical approach to the computation of glass transition temperatures will be given elsewhere.