Related papers: Swelling of responsive-microgels: experiments vers…
The application of a polymer brush in sensing, actuation, self-folding, among others acutely depends on the tuneable bending of a brush-grafted substrate caused by the stress in the brush. However, the stress in a stimuli-responsive brush…
The study of interactions between biomimetic membranes and micron-sized particles is crucial for understanding various biological processes. Here, we control microparticle spontaneous engulfment by giant lipid vesicles by tuning particle…
We resolve the Schr\"{o}der paradox for PNiPAAm brushes, showing experimentally that swelling at 100\% relative humidity (RH) matches the liquid state. This occurs via a sharp increase in swelling above 98\%~RH, a behavior standard models…
Superpositioning of relaxation data as a function of the product variable TV^{\gamma}, where T is temperature, V the specific volume, and {\gamma} a material constant, is an experimental fact demonstrated for approximately 100 liquids and…
We employ small-angle X-ray and dynamic light scattering to investigate the microscopic structure and dynamics of dense suspensions of ultra-low crosslinked (ULC) poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) microgels. By probing the supercooled…
We describe a high-resolution, high-bandwidth technique for determining the local viscoelasticity of soft materials such as polymer gels. Loss and storage shear moduli are determined from the power spectra of thermal fluctuations of…
Hydrogel-based soft actuators can operate in sensitive environments, bridging the gap of rigid machines interacting with soft matter. However, while stimuli-responsive hydrogels can undergo extreme reversible volume changes of up to ~90%,…
The properties of semidilute polymer solutions are investigated at equilibrium and under shear flow by mesoscale simulations, which combine molecular dynamics simulations and the multiparticle collision dynamics approach. In semidilute…
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…
In the technique of microrheology, macroscopic rheological parameters as well as information about local structure are deduced from the behavior of microscopic probe particles under thermal or active forcing. Microrheology requires…
The Self-Consistent Field theory of brushes of neutral water-soluble polymers described by two-state models is formulated in terms of the effective Flory interaction parameter $\chi_{eff}(T,\phi)$ that depends on both temperature, T and the…
Recent progress has been made in the numerical modelling of neutral microgel particles with a realistic, disordered structure. In this work we extend this approach to the case of co-polymerised microgels where a thermoresponsive polymer is…
Thermo-responsive hydrogels are a promising material for creating controllable actuators for use in micro-scale devices, since they expand and contract significantly (absorbing or expelling fluid) in response to relatively small temperature…
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…
We review recent simulation studies of interfaces between immiscible homopolymer phases. Special emphasis is given to the presentation of efficient simulation techniques and powerful methods of data analysis, such as the analysis of…
Ionic microgel particles, when dispersed in a solvent, swell to equilibrium sizes that are governed by a balance between electrostatic and elastic forces. Tuning of particle size by varying external stimuli, such as $p$H, salt…
Soft colloids are increasingly used as model systems to address fundamental issues such as crystallisation and the glass and jamming transitions. Among the available classes of soft colloids, microgels are emerging as the gold standard.…
In recent years, ionic microgels have garnered much attention due to their unique properties, especially their stimulus-sensitive swelling behavior. The tunable response of these soft, permeable, compressible, charged colloidal particles is…
As a model of soft confinement for polymers, we investigated equilibrium shapes of a flexible vesicle that contains a phase-separating polymer solution. To simulate such a system, we combined the phase field theory (PFT) for the vesicle and…
Observations are reported in isothermal torsional oscillation tests on melts of isotactic polypropylene (iPP) and low-density polyethylene (LDPE) in the intervals of temperature between 190 and 250C (iPP) and between 120 and 190C (LDPE).…