Cross-Over Concentration in Polydisperse Polymer Solutions

0 Polydisperse star polymer solutions

We analyze the effect of polydispersity in the arm number on the effective interactions , structural correlations and the phase behavior of star polymers in a good solvent. The effective interaction potential between two star polymers with different arm numbers is derived using scaling theory. The resulting expression is tested against monomer-resolved molecular dynamics simulations. We find th...

Conformations of polydisperse polymer solutions : bimodal distribution

2014 Starting with the Flory theory for one long flexible polymer chain of N segments in a homopolymer melt of shorter (P segments) chains, we employ scaling arguments to construct the « phase diagram » of an athermal bimodal solution, i.e. a ternary system composed of N chains, P chains, and solvent. Qualitatively the presence of short chains reduces the effective solvent quality as experience...

Temperature-concentration diagram of polymer solutions

Adsorption of polydisperse polymer chains

The adsorption of polydisperse ideal polymer chains is shown to be sensitive to the large N tail of the distribution of chains. If and only if the number of chains decays more slowly than exponentially then there is an adsorption transition like that of monodisperse infinite chains. If the number decays exponentially the adsorption density diverges continuously at a temperature which is a funct...

Interdiffusion in a polydisperse polymer blend.

We present a theoretical description of interdiffusion in a binary blend of polymers that exhibit polydispersity in length. The diffusion equations are formulated in terms of the volume fractions and the chain concentrations of the components. This choice of variables is equivalent to the assumption that the local molecular weight distributions of the components are described by the Flory distr...