Related papers: Link between morphology, structure and interaction…
Stimuli-responsive lyogels are considered to be smart materials due to their capability of undergoing significant macroscopic changes in response to external triggers. Due to their versatile and unique properties, smart lyogels exhibit…
Measurements of liquid-liquid phase transition temperatures (cloud points) of mixtures of a protein (lysozyme) and a polymer, poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) show that the addition of low molecular weight PEG stabilizes the mixture whereas high…
The behavior of microgels near surfaces and their adsorption is studied by simple scaling theory. Two different types of microgels can be studied, i.e., fractal type microgels and randomly crosslinked polymer chains. In the first case the…
Understanding polymer adsorption at interfaces is essential for designing advanced polymer-based nanomaterials with tailored interfacial properties. Although adsorption significantly influences the macroscopic properties of polymer…
Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide)-based microgels are soft colloids undergoing a Volume Phase Transition (VPT) close to ambient temperature. Although widely employed for fundamental research and application purposes, the modifications of the…
The effects of particle roughness and short-ranged non-central forces on colloidal gels are studied using computer simulations in which particles experience a sinusoidal variation in energy as they rotate. The number of minima $n$ and…
Combining elastic incoherent neutron scattering and differential scanning calorimetry, we investigate the occurrence of the volume phase transition (VPT) in very concentrated PNIPAM microgel suspensions, from a polymer weight fraction of…
We use numerical simulations to show how noninteracting hard particles binding to a deformable elastic shell may self-assemble into a variety of linear patterns. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to deformations of shells.…
The coupled dynamics of entangled polymers which span a broad time and length scales govern the unique viscoelastic properties of polymers. To follow chain mobility by numerical simulations from the intermediate Rouse and reptation regimes…
Stimuli-responsive lyogels are known for their ability to undergo significant macroscopic changes when exposed to external stimuli. While thermo-responsive gels, such as poly N isopropylacrylamide (pNIPAM), have been extensively studied…
We study the effects of droplet finite size on the structure of nanogel particles synthesized by random crosslinking of molecular polymers diluted in nanoemulsions. For this, we use a bead-spring computer model of polymer-like structures…
Some scenarios for planetesimal formation go through a phase of collapse of gravitationally bound clouds of mm-cm-sized pebbles. Such clouds can form for example through the streaming instability in protoplanetary disks. We model the…
Recent surveys have shown that the number of nanoparticle-based formulations actually used at the clinical level is significantly lower than expected a decade ago. One reason for this is that the nanoparticle physicochemical properties fall…
The encapsulation of fragile biomacromolecules is crucial for many biotechnological applications but remains challenging. Interfacial complexation (IC) in water-in-oil emulsions turned out to be an efficient process for the formation of…
We present a theoretical study of the phase diagram and the structure of a fluid adsorbed in high-porosity aerogels by means of an integral-equation approach combined with the replica formalism. To simulate a realistic gel environment, we…
In this study, we propose a theoretical framework to investigate the interactions between flexible polymer chains, specifically polyelectrolytes (PEs). By calculating the system's free energy while considering position-dependent mutual…
We develop thin films of blends of polystyrene (PS) with the thermoresponsive polymer poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) (PS/PNIPAM) and its diblock copolymer polystyrene-b-poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PS/PS-b-PNIPAM) in different blend…
Enthalpic interactions at the interface between nanoparticles and matrix polymers is known to influence various properties of the resultant polymer nanocomposites (PNC). For athermal PNCs, consisting of grafted nanoparticles embedded in…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations of an idealized polymer melt surrounding a nanoscopic filler particle to probe the effects of a filler on the local melt structure and dynamics. We show that the glass transition temperature $T_g$…
We perform extensive Molecular Dynamics simulations of an ensemble of realistic microgel particles in swollen conditions in a wide range of packing fractions $\zeta$. We compare neutral and charged microgels, where we consider charges…