Carbon dioxide with Polycarbonate (PC) (IUPAC SDS Volume 70)
Evaluator
Yuri P. Yampol'skii A. V. Topchiev Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis, Russian Academy of Sciences
Evaluation
Bisphenol A polycarbonate (for brevity here and further, polycarbonate) is well known and widely used industrial plastic produced by General Electric Co. under a tradename Lexan. Many authors dealt with the system PC-carbon dioxide.1-11 The polymer samples studied were nearly identical in majority of the cases. The data have been obtained in the temperature range 293-373 K and at pressures up to 10 MPa. It was the system PC-CO2, which was used as an example for the demonstration of the effects of annealing and conditioning on the sorption parameters,4,9,11 which are generally characteristic of other glassy polymers. Exposing a polymer sample to high pressure gas, results in an increase in the concentration of dissolved gas the larger the higher is the pressure of such conditioning.4 The annealing of polymer samples at sub-Tg temperatures leads to a decrease in the concentration of the dissolved gas.
The table shows the pressure dependence of the concentration, C, of carbon dioxide dissolved in the polymer samples unconditioned ('as received') and exposed to 2 MPa of carbon dioxide prior to solubility measurement. It is seen that the difference between the individual 'sorption isotherms' is not dramatic. The last line presents average values of C at different pressures.

Pressure dependence of the concentration C/(cm3(STP) cm-3) of dissolved CO2 at 308 K
D $P$ ($\pu{MPa}$) D $C_{1}$ ($\pu{cm3/cm3}$)
5 x 10-1 12.2
5 x 10-1 12.8
5 x 10-1 13.2
5 x 10-1 -
5 x 10-1 11.7
5 x 10-1 -
5 x 10-1 13.2
5 x 10-1 12.6
1.0 16.6
1.0 18.5
1.0 19.0
1.0 17.0
1.0 18.6
1.0 16.0
1.0 19.3
1.0 17.9
1.5 20.6
1.5 23.0
1.5 23.6
1.5 -
1.5 24.0
1.5 -
1.5 24.0
1.5 23.0
2.0 24.5
2.0 27.2
2.0 27.6
2.0 27.0
2.0 28.7
2.0 26.0
2.0 28.1
2.0 27.0

Sources:

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