4. Conclusion

The equation of state remains a very effective and powerful tool for studying the thermodynamic properties and phase behavior of polymers. Such behaviors include phase equilibria of polymers and monomers during polymerization, association effects in the case of functional polymers and aqueous polymer systems, and the influence of copolymer composition on blend miscibility. At best, it would be interesting to have an equation of state applicable to all thermodynamic behavior of polymer systems. With this in mind, an overview of the versatility of empirical, semi-empirical and theoretical equations of state has been presented. Of these equations, the purely empirical Tait equation, which is in fact a smoothing of experimental data, is the most accurate for representing PVT data. The coefficients of the other equations are often calculated from the Tait equation. Other models, whose reduction...