Purification of silicone oils for fluid experiments

✍ Scribed by M. F. Schatz; K. Howden

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1995
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 273 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0723-4864
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00203423

✦ Synopsis

Commercially produced silicone oils (polydimethylsiloxanes or PDMS) that are used in many fluid experiments typically contain a mixture of linear polymers with a distribution of molecular weights. This multicomponent constitution can cause undesirable effects in some experiments; we show one such effect in surface-tension-driven B~nard convection. We describe a simple distillation protocol for obtaining low viscosity single-component silicone oils from commercially available mixtures. For polymers with molecular weights ~ 1000, our method yields purities of better than 95 %.