Related papers: Cosolvency response in polymer brushes
Polymer brushes normally swell in a good solvent and collapse in a poor solvent. An abnormal response of polymer brushes, so-called co-nonsolvency, is the phenomenon where the brush counter-intuitively collapses in a good solvent mixture.…
Cononsolvency occurs when two miscible, competing good solvents for a polymer are mixed, resulting in a loss of solubility. In this study, we demonstrate through simulations, supported by theory, that cononsolvency can be driven solely by…
The collapse and swelling behavior of a generic homopolymer is studied using implicit-solvent, explicit-cosolvent Langevin dynamics computer simulations for varying interaction strengths. The systematic investigation reveals that polymer…
Shear responsive surfaces offer potential advances in a number of applications. Surface functionalisation using polymer brushes is one route to such properties, particularly in the case of entangled polymers. We report on neutron…
Brush-like structures emerge from stretching of long polymer chains, densely grafted on to the surface of an impermeable substrate. They arise due to the competition between conformational entropic elasticity of polymer chains and excluded…
The associative interaction, such as hydrogen bonding, can bring about versatile functionalities to polymer systems, which has been investigated by tremendous researches, but the fundamental understanding on association process is still…
Polymer behavior in mixed solvents often exhibits intriguing phenomena, such as cosolvency, where a polymer that collapses in two individually poor solvents becomes soluble in their mixture. In this study, we employ a combination of…
Solutions of semiflexible polymers confined by repulsive planar walls are studied by density functional theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations, to clarify the competition between the chain alignment favored by the wall and the depletion…
Recently a novel class of responsive uncharged polymer brushes has been proposed [Klushin et al, J. Chem. Phys. 154, 074904 (2021)] where the brush-forming chains have an affinity to the substrate. For sufficiently strong surface…
We propose a design for polymer-based sensors and switches with sharp switching transition and fast response time. The switching mechanism involves a radical change in the conformations of adsorption-active minority chains in a brush. Such…
The system of polymers in solvent mixtures is a widely-used model to represent biomolecular condensates in intracellular environments. Here, we apply a variational theory to control the center-of-mass of two polymers and perform the first…
Polymer brushes are attractive as surface coatings for a wide range of applications, from fundamental research to everyday life, and also play important roles in biological systems. How colloids (e.g., functional nanoparticles, proteins,…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to investigate the conformations of a single polymer chain, represented by the Kremer-Grest bead-spring model, in a solution with a Lennard-Jones liquid as the solvent when the interaction strength…
Chain-like macromolecules (polymers) show characteristic adsorption properties due to their flexibility and internal degrees of freedom, when attracted to surfaces and interfaces. In this review we discuss concepts and features that are…
A coarse grained model for flexible polymers end-grafted to repulsive spherical nanoparticles is studied for various chain lengths and grafting densities under good solvent conditions, by Molecular Dynamics methods and density functional…
We study the Brownian dynamics of flexible and semiflexible polymer chains densely grafted on a flat substrate, upon rapid quenching of the system when the quality of solvent becomes poor and chains attempt collapse into a globular state.…
The influence of poor solvent quality on fluid demixing of a model mixture of colloids and nonadsorbing polymers is investigated using density functional theory. The colloidal particles are modelled as hard spheres and the polymer coils as…
Using a combination of analytical theory, Monte Carlo simulations, and three dimensional self-consistent field calculations, we study the equilibrium properties and the switching behavior of adsorption-active polymer chains included in a…
Lattice model of directed self avoiding walk has been solved analytically to investigate adsorption desorption phase transition behaviour of a semiflexible sequential copolymer chain on a two dimensional impenetrable surface perpendicular…
We propose a novel class of responsive polymer brushes, where the effective grafting density can be controlled by external stimuli. This is achieved by using end-grafted polymer chains that have an affinity to the substrate. For…