JOURNAL OF POLYMER SCIENCE: PART A-1 VOL. 5 (1967)

BOOK REVIEWS Chemical Beactions at High Pressures. K. E. WEALE. E. and F. Spon Ltd., London, 1967. 349 pp. $12.50.

Since the publication of Hamann’s Physh-Chemical E f e d of Pressure in 1957, there have appeared several volumes dealing with the physical, geophysical, chemical, and engineering aspects of high pressure research. Although, jointly, these works cover nearly all major recent research topics, they contain the contributions of many authors and lack the unity of a monograph. For this reason, and because it covers the field of high pressure chemistry in greater detail than do earlier works, the present volume fulfills a definite need.

Dr. Weale who has been associated for many years with Imperial College of Science and Technology, one of the oldest and most influential centers of high pressure research, reviews high pressure chemistry comprehensively with special emphasis on research done in the past ten years. The volume contains several introductory chapters dealing with experimental technique and with the thermodynamies of high pressure in single and multiphase systems. Here, much of the discussion follows lines similar to those of Hamann’s book, but new experimental results are presented. The inclusion of these chapters is appropriate, not only because nearly all kinetic treatments of high pressure reactions are based on transition state theory, but also because rather unfamiliar types of phase equilibria sometimes control the course of such reactions.

The later chapters include an up-to-date review of organic reactions in liquids and in gases. Gas reactions, in particular, had received relatively scanty treatment in earlier reviews, eapecially their kinetics, which are more difficult to treat here than in less compressible systems. Of particular interest to the polymer chemist will be the most comprehensive treatment

yet published of polymerization and polymerizability at high pressures, including copolymerization, one of the author’s major interests. There is a brief discussion of the high pressure polymerization of ethylene. Anyone interested in the commercial poten- tial of other high pressure polymerizations will find Chapters 8 and 9 useful background material.

Analysis and criticism of experimental results seem to me to have been carried to a level of sophistication appropriate to the subject matter.

The book reads well.

Paul Ehrlich Department of Chemical Engineering State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, New York 14214

Polymer Fractionation. New York, 1967. 527 pp.

MANFRED J. R. CANTOW, ED. Academic Press,

The continuing need to explore the relation of polymer structure with solution and solid state properties has provided the impetus for polymer scientists to investigate many methods of separation and analysis utilizing a variety of physical principles. In con- tending with such structural features as molecular weight, branching, isomerization, stereoregularity and chemical composition and their distribution in a given material, it is not surprising that polymer fractionation and analysis has become rich and complex.

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