Related papers: Elastic critical behaviour in a 3d model for polym…
Polymer gels have been shown to behave as viscoelastic materials but only a small amount of data is usually provided in the glassy transition. In this paper, the dynamic moduli G' and G" of polyacrylamide hydrogels are investigated using…
The water flow through the poly(acrylamide) gel under a constant water pressure is measured by newly designed apparatus. The time evolution of the water flow in the gel, is calculated based on the collective diffusion model of the polymer…
In this work, we develop a rigorous theoretical framework for the evolution of linear viscoelastic properties across the sol-gel transition. More specifically, we derive general admissible expressions for the relaxation modulus and dynamic…
Shear relaxation and dynamic density fluctuations are studied within a Rouse model, generalized to include the effects of permanent random crosslinks. We derive an exact correspondence between the static shear viscosity and the resistance…
Predicting the mechanical response of the soft gel materials under external deformation is of paramount importance in many areas, such as foods, pharmaceuticals, solid-liquid separations, cosmetics, aerogels and drug delivery. Most of the…
Physically assembled gels have promising applications in many fields because of their tunable mechanical properties. Here, we report the mechanical properties as a function of polymer volume fraction ($\phi$) for a physical gel system…
We study a model for the gel degradation by an enzyme, where the gel is schematized as a cubic lattice, and the enzyme as a random walker, that cuts the bonds over which it passes. The model undergoes a (reverse) percolation transition,…
We study a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to investigate its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…
Three-dimensional molecular dynamics simulations of dissipative particles (~ 10^6) are carried out for studying the clustering kinetics of granular media during cooling. The inter-connected high particle density regions are identified,…
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…
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…
Molecular dynamics simulations have been employed to study the formation of a physical (thermoreversible) gel by amphiphilic A-B-A triblock copolymers in aqueous solution. In order to mimic the structure of hydrogel-forming polypeptides…
We investigate sample-to-sample fluctuations of the shear modulus in ensembles of particle packings near the jamming transition. Unlike the average modulus, which exhibits distinct scaling behaviours depending on the interparticle…
The study of the Ising model from a percolation perspective has played a significant role in the modern theory of critical phenomena. We consider the celebrated square-lattice Ising model and construct percolation clusters by placing bonds,…
We investigated the viscoelastic properties of colloid-polymer mixtures at intermediate colloid volume fraction and varying polymer concentrations, thereby tuning the attractive interactions. Within the examined range of polymer…
We show that non-entangled polymers display an elastic-like behaviour at a macroscopic scale (probed at some 0.100 mm thickness) up to at least hundred degrees above the glass transition temperature. This observation, found under…
We recently found that the energy contribution to the linear elasticity of polymer gels in the as-prepared state can be a significant negative value; the shear modulus is not proportional to the absolute temperature [Y. Yoshikawa et al.,…
We study percolation as a critical phenomenon on a multifractal support. The scaling exponents of the the infinite cluster size ($\beta$ exponent) and the fractal dimension of the percolation cluster ($d_f$) are quantities that seem do not…
Glass formers exhibit a viscoelastic behavior: at the laboratory timescale, they behave like (glassy) solids at low temperatures, and like liquids at high temperatures. Based on this observation, elastic models relate the long time…
Using molecular dynamics computer simulations we investigate the structural and dynamical properties of a simple model for a colloidal gel at low volume fraction. We find that at low T the system is forming an open percolating cluster,…