Related papers: Predicting structure and swelling of microgels wit…
The diffusion of molecules (penetrants) of variable size, shape, and chemistry through dense crosslinked polymer networks is a fundamental scientific problem that is broadly relevant in materials, polymer, physical and biological chemistry.…
The miscibility in several polymer blend mixtures (polymethylmethacrylate/polystyrene, (1,4-cis) polyisoprene/polystyrene, and polymethylmethacrylate/polyoxyethylene) has been investigated using Molecular Dynamics simulations for atomistic…
Superresolution microscopy has become a powerful tool to investigate the internal structure of complex colloidal and polymeric systems, such as microgels, at the nanometer scale. The ability to monitor microgels response to temperature…
Depending on the volume fraction and interparticle interactions, colloidal suspensions can form different phases, ranging from fluids, crystals, and glasses to gels. For soft microgels that are made from thermoresponsive polymers, the…
The mechanical properties of a disordered heterogeneous medium depend, in general, on a complex interplay between multiple length scales. Connecting local interactions to macroscopic observables, such as stiffness or fracture, is thus…
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 report temperature-responsive soft composites of semiflexible biopolymer networks (fibrin) containing dispersed microgel colloidal particles of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (pNIPAM) that undergo a thermodynamically driven de-swelling…
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…
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…
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…
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…
When dense granular gases are continuously excited under microgravity conditions, spatial inhomogeneities of the particle number density can emerge. A significant share of particles may collect in strongly overpopulated regions, called…
Ferrogels, i.e. swollen polymer networks into which magnetic particles are immersed, can be considered as "smart materials" since their shape and elasticity can be controlled by an external magnetic field. Using molecular dynamics…
The mechanical properties of a material are intimately related to its microstructure. This is particularly important for predicting mechanical behavior of polycrystalline metals, where microstructural variations dictate the expected…
Particle surface chemistry and internal softness are two fundamental parameters in governing the mechanical properties of dense colloidal suspensions, dictating structure and flow, therefore of interest from materials fabrication to…
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…
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…
Achieving optimal solubility of active substances in polymeric carriers is of fundamental importance for a number of industrial applications, including targeted drug delivery within the growing field of nanomedicine. However, its…
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…
Using a simplified microstructural picture we show that interactions between thermosenstive microgel particles can be described by a polymer brush like corona decorating the dense core. The softness of the potential is set by the relative…