Related papers: Modelling realistic microgels in an explicit solve…
Using statistical field theory supplemented with molecular dynamics simulations, we consider premelting on the surface of ice as a generic consequence of broken hydrogen bonds at the boundary between the condensed and gaseous phases. A…
Molecular models of real fluids are validated by comparing the vapor-liquid surface tension from molecular dynamics (MD) simulation to correlations of experimental data. The considered molecular models consist of up to 28 interaction sites,…
Controlled crystallization, melting and vitrification are important fundamental processes in nature and technology. However, the microscopic details of these fundamental phenomena still lack understanding, in particular how the cooling rate…
Stimuli-responsive gels are the gels that vary the volume depending on environmental conditions. It has been reported that the stimuli-responsive gel with an inhomogeneous structure exhibits faster volume change than the gel without it. It…
We introduce a new measure of the structure of a liquid which is the softness of the mean-field potential developed by us earlier. We find that this softness is sensitive to small changes in the structure. We then study its correlation with…
Self-assembled monolayers of microparticles encoding Archimedean and non-regular tessellations promise unprecedented structure-property relationships for a wide spectrum of applications in fields ranging from optoelectronics to surface…
We investigate the swelling dynamics driven by solvent absorption in a hydrogel sphere immersed in a solvent bath, through an accurate computational model and numerical study. We extensively describe the transient process from dry to wet…
Liquid mixtures composed of colloidal particles and much smaller non-adsorbing linear homopolymers can undergo a gelation transition due to polymer-mediated depletion forces. We now show that the addition of linear polymers to suspensions…
Microgels are elastic and deformable particles with a hybrid nature between that of polymers and colloids and unconventional behaviours with respect to hard colloids. We investigated the dynamics of a soft microgel made of interpenetrated…
We consider a functional surface comprising thermoresponsive polymer chains, the material that has found numerous technological and biomedical applications. However, to achieve the required time and length scales for computer modelling of…
Poroelastic materials, consisting of a permeable solid matrix infiltrated with fluid, are ubiquitous in natural and engineering contexts. In poroelastic polymer solids, the elastic matrix swells to equilibrium when immersed in a solvent…
By means of Langevin dynamics simulations, we investigate the gel formation of randomly functionalized polymers in solution, with the ability to form both intra- and intermolecular reversible bonds. Under highly dilute conditions, these…
Letting free polymers diffuse from solution into a crosslinked polymer gel is often a crucial processing step in the synthesis of multiphase polymer-based gels, e.g., core-shell microgels. Here we use coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
The elastic properties of a soft matter material can be greatly altered by the presence of solid inclusions whose microscopic properties, such as their size and interactions, can have a dramatic effect. In order to shed light on these…
We study the thermodynamics of binary mixtures with the volume fraction of the minority component less than the amount required to form a flat interface and show that the surface tension dominated equilibrium phase of the mixture forms a…
Microgels are soft microparticles that often exhibit thermoresponsiveness and feature a transformation at a critical temperature, referred to as the volume phase transition temperature. The question of whether this transformation occurs as…
Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (pNIPAM) microgels are renowned for their thermoresponsive behavior, exhibiting a distinct volume phase transition (VPT) upon temperature changes. This study investigates the influence of microgel softness,…
The equilibrium properties of ionic microgels are investigated using a combination of the Poisson-Boltzmann and Flory theories. Swelling behavior, density profiles, and effective charges are all calculated in a self-consistent way. Special…
We determine the solvent mediated contribution to the effective potentials for model colloidal or nano- particles dispersed in a binary solvent that exhibits fluid-fluid phase separation. Using a simple density functional theory we…
We use large-scale computer simulations to explore the non-equilibrium aging dynamics in a microscopic model for colloidal gels. We find that gelation resulting from a kinetically-arrested phase separation is accompanied by `anomalous'…