Polymer solutions: from hard monomers to soft polymers
نویسندگان
چکیده
A coarse-graining strategy for dilute and semi-dilute solutions of interacting polymers, and of colloid–polymer mixtures, is briefly described. Monomer degrees of freedom are traced out to derive an effective, state-dependent pair potential between the polymer centres of mass. The cross-over between good and poor solvent conditions is discussed within a scaling analysis. The method is extended to block copolymers represented as ‘necklaces’ of soft ‘blobs’, and its success is illustrated here in the case of a symmetric diblock copolymer which exhibits microphase separation.
منابع مشابه
Non-monotonic temperature response of polymer mediated interactions.
In a recent publication, Feng et al. [Feng et al., Nat. Mater., 2015, 14, 61] reported a very interesting re-entrant solidification behaviour of colloidal particles in an aqueous solution containing polyethylene oxide (PEO). In this system, a crystalline colloidal phase, which is present at low temperatures, melts to a homogeneous fluid upon increasing the temperature. Further raising the tempe...
متن کاملRelating monomer to centre-of-mass distribution functions in polymer solutions
– A relationship between the measurable monomer-monomer structure factor, and the centre-of-mass (CM) structure factor of dilute or semi-dilute polymer solutions is derived from Ornstein-Zernike relations within the “polymer reference interaction site model” (PRISM) formalism, by considering the CM of each polymer as an auxiliary site and neglecting direct correlations between the latter and th...
متن کاملPolymer depletion interaction between two parallel repulsive walls.
The depletion interaction between two parallel repulsive walls confining a dilute solution of long and flexible polymer chains is studied by field-theoretic methods. Special attention is paid to self-avoidance between chain monomers relevant for polymers in a good solvent. Our direct approach avoids the mapping of the actual polymer chains on effective hard or soft spheres. We compare our resul...
متن کاملFlory-Huggins theory for athermal mixtures of hard spheres and larger flexible polymers.
A simple analytic theory for mixtures of hard spheres and larger polymers with excluded volume interactions is developed. The mixture is shown to exhibit extensive immiscibility. For large polymers with strong excluded volume interactions, the density of monomers at the critical point for demixing decreases as one over the square root of the length of the polymer, while the density of spheres t...
متن کاملEmulsion Polymers of Core-Shell Styrene-Butyl Acrylate: The Effect of Feeding and Aging Time on Particle Size Distribution
Core-shell polymers in the particle size range 200–300 nm having a monodisperse distribution and opal color are prospective materials for coating applications. The emulsion polymerization of the core-shell was done using two monomers with significantly different refractive indices styrene for the hard monomers and butyl acrylate for the soft monomers. The feeding and aging time were varied, wit...
متن کامل