Related papers: Temperature-driven volume transition in hydrogels:…
Most thermodynamic modeling of hydrogels focused on predicting their final volumes in equilibrium with water, built on Flory's theories for the entropy of mixing and rubber elasticity, and Donnan's equilibrium conditions if polyelectrolyte…
Thermoresponsive microgels are soft colloids that find widespread use as model systems for soft matter physics. Their complex internal architecture, made of a disordered and heterogeneous polymer network, has been so far a major challenge…
Stimulus-induced volumetric phase transition in gels may be potentially exploited for various bio-engineering and mechanical engineering applications. Since the discovery of the phenomenon in the 1970s, extensive experimental research has…
Fluid polyamorphism, the existence of multiple amorphous fluid states in a single-component system, has been observed or predicted in a variety of substances. A remarkable example of this phenomenon is the fluid-fluid phase transition in…
Thermo-responsive microgel particles can exhibit a drastic volume shrinkage upon increasing the solvent temperature. Recently we found that the spreading of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide)(PNiPAm) microgels at a liquid interface under the…
Liquid-gas phase coexistence in a boundary-driven diffusive system is studied by analyzing fluctuating hydrodynamics of a density field defined on a one-dimensional lattice with a space interval $\Lambda$. When an interface width $\ell$ is…
Several aspects of the theory of the coexistence of phases and equilibrium forms are discussed. In section 1, the problem is studied from the point of view of thermodynamics. In section 2, the statistical mechanical theory is introduced. We…
Microgels are often discussed as well-suited model system for soft colloids. In contrast to rigid spheres, the microgel volume and, coupled to this, the volume fraction in dispersion can be manipulated by external stimuli. This behavior is…
Interpenetrated Polymer Network (IPN) microgels of PNIPAM and PAAc have been investigated and the experimental data have been compared with theoretical models from the Flory-Rehner theory. We confirm that the swelling behavior of PNIPAM…
A diffused interface model describing the evolution of two conterminous incompressible fluids in a porous medium is discussed. The system consists of the Cahn-Hilliard equation with Flory-Huggins logarithmic potential, coupled via surface…
The volume phase transition of microgels is one of the most paradigmatic examples of stimuli-responsiveness, enabling a collapse from a highly swollen microgel state into a densely coiled state by an external stimulus. Although well…
In equilibrium and supercooled liquids, polymorphism is manifested by thermodynamic regions defined in the phase diagram, which are predominantly of different short- and medium-range order (local structure). It is found that on the phase…
We present a pedagogical review of the swelling thermodynamics and phase transitions of polymer gels. In particular, we discuss how features of the volume phase transition of the gel's osmotic equilibrium is analogous to other transitions…
During the melting transition of dimyristoyl phosphatidylglycerol (DMPG), the order of the lipid chains and the three-dimensional, vesicular structural arrangement change simultaneously. These changes result in peculiar heat capacity…
We investigate dynamical heterogeneities in the collective relaxation of a concentrated microgel system, for which the packing fraction can be conveniently varied by changing the temperature. The packing fraction dependent mechanical…
Numerical simulations of systems at coexistence are known to yield unstable fields in some regions of the density parameters, as well as inequivalence of ensembles. The Van der Waals-like loops are attributed to effects of the interface…
We study liquid-gas transitions of heat conduction systems in contact with two heat baths under constant pressure in the linear response regime. On the basis of local equilibrium thermodynamics, we propose an equality with a global…
We investigate non-equilibrium phase coexistence associated with a first-order phase transition by numerically studying a one-dimensional Hamiltonian-Potts model with fractional spatial derivatives. The fractional derivative is introduced…
A phenomenological model for the unbinding transition of multi-component fluid membranes is proposed, where the unbinding transition is described using a theory analogous to Flory-Huggins theory for polymers. The coupling between the…
This work is devoted to the consistent modeling of a three-phase mixture of a gas, a liquid and its vapor. Since the gas and the vapor are mis-cible, the mixture is subjected to a non-symmetric constraint on the volume. Adopting the Gibbs…