Liquid Crystalline Structure of Hydroxypropyl Cellulose-Estimation of Intrinsic Anisotropy of Rigid Polymer Chain-

Abstract

The lyotropic cholesteric liquid crystalline structure of hydroxypropyl cellulose (HPC) was investigated by birefringence measurements. Polymers of the rigid main chain can form liquid crystalline structures with a higher order parameter of almost 1. Moreover, owing to their chain length, their domain size is larger than that of low molecular weight liquid crystals. The principal refractive indexes of the HPC liquid crystal,whose cholesteric plane oriented parallel to the plane of prism of a refractometer, were measured. These refractive indexes coincided with the values calculated from the intrinsic birefringence of HPC chain by the flow orientation measurement of liquid crystalline solutions. This means that the order parameter of polymer chains is very high in the polymer liquid crystalline domain, when the solutions is thoroughly aged after some orientation treatment. © 1986, The Society of Polymer Science, Japan. All rights reserved.