Polymer, Vol.36, No.4, 879-882, 1995
Characterization of a Stiff-Chain Polyimide in Solution
An analysis of the conformation of a stiff-chain polyimide in solution is given. It is shown that these polyimides exhibit the rather low persistence length of 13 nm despite the fact that the repeating unit consists of stiff and fully linear building blocks. A comparison with recent experimental and theoretical findings on similar systems corroborates the present analysis and suggests the bending fluctuations of the bonds as the main reason for the rather high flexibility.