Polymer crowding and shape distributions in polymer-nanoparticle mixtures

Depletion-induced forces and crowding in polymer-nanoparticle mixtures: Role of polymer shape fluctuations and penetrability.

Depletion forces and macromolecular crowding govern the structure and function of biopolymers in biological cells and the properties of polymer nanocomposite materials. To isolate and analyze the influence of polymer shape fluctuations and penetrability on depletion-induced interactions and crowding by nanoparticles, we model polymers as effective penetrable ellipsoids, whose shapes fluctuate a...

Influence of polymer shape on depletion potentials and crowding in colloid-polymer mixtures.

Depletion-induced interactions between colloids in colloid-polymer mixtures depend in range and strength on size, shape, and concentration of depletants. Crowding by colloids in turn affects shapes of polymer coils, such as biopolymers in biological cells. By simulating hard-sphere colloids and random-walk polymers, modeled as fluctuating ellipsoids, we compute depletion-induced potentials and ...

Nanoparticle Dynamics in Polymer Melts

Fluid demixing in colloid–polymer mixtures: Influence of polymer interactions

We consider a binary mixture of hard colloidal spheres and nonadsorbing polymer coils. The polymers are regarded as effective spheres that interact with one another via a repulsive step-function pair potential and with colloids solely via excluded volume. The system is treated with a geometry-based density functional theory based on the exact zero-dimensional limit of the model. For bulk fluid ...

Polymer induced depletion potentials in polymer-colloid mixtures

The depletion interactions between two colloidal plates or between two colloidal spheres, induced by interacting polymers in a good solvent, are calculated theoretically and by computer simulations. A simple analytical theory is shown to be quantitatively accurate for the case of two plates. A related depletion potential is derived for two spheres; it also agrees very well with direct computer ...