0000000000231034
AUTHOR
Rong Wang
Stretching of Free Chains Confined in Concave Brush-Coated Nanocylinders
The structure of a free flexible macromolecule confined in a cylindrical nanopore whose wall is coated by a polymer brush is studied by Monte Carlo simulation, varying the grafting density as well as the radius of the cylindrical pore. Because of this confinement, the free chain is stretched in axial direction; while for small grafting densities of the brush the end-to-end distance increases monotonously with decreasing pore radius, a nonmonotonic variation occurs for larger grafting densities. We show that this effect is due to strong interpenetration of the free chain and the brush chains; for very narrow pores a strong layering of cylindrical shells is found, and comparison with self-con…
Conformational Properties of Polymer Mushrooms Under Spherical and Cylindrical Confinement
A coarse grained model of a flexible macromolecule end-grafted on the inside of a sphere or a cylinder under good solvent conditions is studied by Monte Carlo simulations. For cylindrical confinement, two regimes are found: when the cylinder radius R exceeds the gyration radius R 90 of the polymer mushroom grafted to a planar surface, a simple scaling description holds. In the opposite case, a non-monotonic crossover to a cigar-like quasi-one-dimensional structure occurs, and the distribution P e (x) of the free chain end in the x-direction along the cylinder axis becomes bimodal. Spherical confinement, on the other hand, causes a crossover from dilute to semidilute behavior of the structur…