Related papers: Polyelectrolyte gels in poor solvent: Equilibrium …
We propose a framework to study the spatio-temporal evolution of liquid-liquid phase separation of weak polyelectrolytes in ionic solutions. Unlike strong polyelectrolytes, which carry a fixed charge, the charge state of weak…
We propose and analyze a mathematical model of the mechanics of gels, consisting of the laws of balance of mass and linear momentum. We consider a gel to be an immiscible and incompressible mixture of a nonlinearly elastic polymer and a…
Large deformations of soft elastic beads spinning at high angular velocity in a denser background fluid are investigated theoretically, numerically, and experimentally using millimeter-size polyacrylamide hydrogel particles introduced in a…
The adsorption of highly \textit{oppositely} charged flexible polyelectrolytes (PEs) on a charged planar substrate is investigated by means of Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. We study in detail the equilibrium structure of the first few PE…
Disordered biopolymer gels have striking mechanical properties including strong nonlinearities. In the case of athermal gels (such as collagen-I) the nonlinearity has long been associated with a crossover from a bending dominated to a…
We investigate the complexation of a highly charged sphere with a long flexible polyelectrolyte, \textit{both negatively charged} in salt free environment. Electroneutrality is insured by the presence of divalent counterions. Using…
We study the bending rigidity of highly charged stiff polyelectrolytes, for both a single chain and many chains forming a bundle. A theory is developed to account for the interplay between competitive binding of counterions and charge…
We consider the complexation of highly charged semiflexible polyelectrolytes with oppositely charged macroions. On the basis of scaling arguments we discuss how the resulting complexes depend on the persistence length of the…
This paper investigates the problem of electrophoretic motion of a polyelectrolyte capsule with a porous arbitrary charged conducting shell in an electrolyte under the action of an external electric field. The corresponding boundary value…
Experimental results from mechanical viscoelastic as well as dielectric relaxation times were compared to theoretical expectations utilizing polymer scaling theory. Viscoelastic relaxation of a hydrogel at 33% relative humidity fabricated…
Inspired by recent experiments and simulations on pattern formation in biomolecules by optical tweezers, a theoretical description based on reference interaction site model (RISM) integral equation method is developed to calculate the…
Polymer gels behave as soft viscoelastic solids and exhibit a generic nonlinear mechanical response characterized by pronounced stiffening prior to irreversible failure, most often through macroscopic fractures. Here, we aim at capturing…
Within the Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) approach electrolytes in contact with planar, spherical, and cylindrical electrodes are analyzed systematically. The dependences of their capacitance $C$ on the surface charge density $\sigma$ and the ionic…
Polyelectrolyte (PE) brushes have ubiquitous applications as surface modifiers which regulate various structural and dynamic properties. Here, we apply a continuous-space self-consistent field theory to study the structural heterogeneity in…
We study pattern formation in gels undergoing simultaneous phase separation and orientational ordering. A 2D numerical simulation is performed using a minimal model of nonlinear elasticity with density-anisotropy coupling. For strong…
We present a novel, self-consistent and robust theoretical model to investigate elastic interactions between topological defects in liquid crystal shells. Accounting for the non-concentric nature of the shell in a simple manner, we are able…
Ionic microgel particles are intriguing systems in which the properties of thermo-responsive polymeric colloids are enriched by the presence of charged groups. In order to rationalize their properties and predict the behaviour of microgel…
We study equilibrium configurations of non-Euclidean plates, in which the reference metric is uniaxially periodic. This work is motivated by recent experiments on thin sheets of composite thermally responsive gels [1]. Such sheets bend…
The combination of two techniques (Small Angle X-ray Scattering and Atomic Force Microscopy) has allowed us to measure in reciprocal and real space the correlation length $\xi$ of salt-free aqueous solutions of highly charged hydrophobic…
The sol-gel transition is studied in two purely entropic models consisting of hard spheres in continuous three-dimensional space, with a fraction $p$ of nearest neighbor spheres tethered by inextensible bonds. When all the tethers are…