Home CV Research People Teaching Blog

Schmidt - Browse papers with the paper browser

[bare list] [illustrated] [by topic]
    Reference [<] [>] [x] : Figure [<] [>] [x]

    31. Colloid-induced polymer compression
    A. R. Denton and M. Schmidt, J. Phys.: Condens. Matt. 14, 12051 (2002).
    Locate in [bare] [illustrated] list. Get [full paper] as pdf.

    Abstract. We consider a model mixture of hard colloidal spheres and nonadsorbing polymer chains in a theta solvent. The polymer component is modelled as a polydisperse mixture of effective spheres, mutually noninteracting but excluded from the colloids, with radii that are free to adjust to allow for colloid-induced compression. We investigate the bulk fluid demixing behaviour of this model system using a geometry-based density functional theory that includes the polymer size polydispersity and configurational free energy, obtained from the exact radius-of-gyration distribution for an ideal (random-walk) chain. Free energies are computed by minimizing the free energy functional with respect to the polymer size distribution. With increasing colloid concentration and polymer-to-colloid size ratio, colloidal confinement is found to increasingly compress the polymers. Correspondingly, the demixing fluid binodal shifts, compared to the incompressible-polymer binodal, to higher polymer densities on the colloid-rich branch, stabilizing the mixed phase. [figures]


    Read the [full paper] as pdf.

    Colloid-polymer mixtures: Beyond the AOV model

    Extensions include taking into account an explicit solvent of point particles [27], penetrability of (small) colloids into polymers [28], colloid-induced polymer compression [31], the influence of polymer interactions on fluid-demixing [34] and on the contact angle of the colloidal liquid-gas interface and a hard wall [50], as well as the stability of the floating liquid phase in sedimenting colloid-polymer mixtures for non-ideal polymers [52].

    [more]

Legal. The material on this website is intended as a scientific resource for the private use of individual scholars. None of it may be used commercially, or for financial gain. Some of the material is protected by copyright. Requests for permission to make public use of any of the papers, or material therein, should be sought from the original publisher, or from M. Schmidt, as appropriate.
MS, 20 Apr 2009.