Electroosmotic Flow in Mixed Polymer Brush-Grafted Nanochannels

Electroosmotic Flow in Mixed Polymer Brush-Grafted Nanochannels

Mixed polymer brush-grafted nanochannels—where two distinct species of polymers are alternately grafted on the inner surface of nanochannels—are an interesting class of nanostructured hybrid materials. By using a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation method, we are able to simulate the electrokinetic transport dynamics of the fluid in such nanochannels as well as the conformational behav...

Mesoscopic simulations of electroosmotic flow and electrophoresis in nanochannels

We present dissipative particle (DPD) simulations of electrolyte flow in nanochannels for varying salt concentration and surface slip conditions. First, a method is presented by which the slip length δ Β at the channel boundaries can be tuned systematically from negative to infinity by introducing suitable wall-fluid friction forces. Using this method, we study electroosmotic flow (EOF) in nano...

Membrane rigidity induced by grafted polymer brush.

The contribution of neutral polymer brush to the curvature elasticity of the grafting surface is investigated theoretically. Using self-consistent field theory, we accurately evaluate the dependence of bending modulus on parameters including chain length, Flory-Huggins parameter and grafting density and reveal the importance of solvent. The results show that the brush-induced bending modulus fo...

Self-organization of homopolymer brush- and mixed homopolymer brush-grafted silica nanoparticles in block copolymers and polymer blends

In this report, hierarchical self-organization of poly(tert-butyl acrylate) (PtBA) brushand mixed PtBA/ polystyrene (PS) brush-grafted silica nanoparticles (NPs) in PtBA-b-PS block copolymer and PtBA/PS polymer blend matrices having different molecular weights was investigated using transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Driven by the entropic interactions between the brushes and the polymer m...

Similarity of electroosmotic flows in nanochannels