Comment on “New Method to Probe the Surface Properties of Polymer Thin Films by Two-Dimensional (2D) Inverse Gas Chromatography (iGC)”

Determining London dispersive surface energy, polar thermodynamic variables, and Lewis acid–base behavior of solid surfaces is crucial in many industrial applications such as adhesion, catalysis, chemical engineering, biomaterials, and technologic processes. Inverse gas chromatography at infinite dilution is a powerful technique that allows the determination of the surface thermodynamic parameters of the interaction between solid materials and organic solvents. In their most recent study, Cho et al. determined the London dispersive surface energy and polar and Lewis acid–base parameters using the Schultz et al. method. These authors committed serious errors and inconsistencies. In this paper, we show the issues made by Cho et al. and proposed a more rigorous model to determine the surface properties of solid materials. Our model using the thermal effect on the surface area of organic molecules was applied on several solid surfaces and showed the various incoherences made by Cho et al. that also neglected the entropic contribution, while it was proved that this contribution is as important as the polar free energy of adsorption.