Search results for "NODAL"

Polyelectrolyte Complexes: Phase Diagram and Intrinsic Viscosities of the System Water/Poly(2-vinylpyridinium-Br)/Poly(styrene sulfonate-Na)

2012

In contrast to all earlier work on that subject, measurements are performed at high dilution up to total polymer concentrations wpol of 0.5 wt%. Aqueous solutions of poly(2-vinylpyridinium-Br) and of poly(styrene sulfonate-Na) are only fully miscible if wpol < 0.02 wt%. Decomposition into two liquid phases is observed upon an increase in wpol, where the extension of the miscibility gap is considerably larger at 60 than at 25 °C. Viscosity measurements demonstrate that the formation of the polyelectrolyte complexes may take hours. The intrinsic viscosity of the polyanion turns out to be 20 times larger than that of the polycation and to be much more sensitive toward the addition of extra sal…

Bulk and interfacial properties in colloid-polymer mixtures

2005

Large-scale Monte Carlo simulations of a phase-separating colloid-polymer mixture are performed and compared to recent experiments. The approach is based on effective interaction potentials in which the central monomers of self-avoiding polymer chains are used as effective coordinates. By incorporating polymer nonideality together with soft colloid-polymer repulsion, the predicted binodal is in excellent agreement with recent experiments. In addition, the interfacial tension as well as the capillary length are in quantitative agreement with experimental results obtained at a number of points in the phase-coexistence region, without the use of any fit parameters.

Phase Transitions of Polymer Blends and Block Copolymer Melts in Thin Films

1999

Treatment of poly(styrene-co-methacrylic acid)/poly(4-vinylpyridine) blends in solution under liquid–liquid phase-separation conditions. A new method…

2006

Phase diagrams are contributed for polymer mixture systems in solution. One polymer has proton-acceptor character and the other has growing proton-donor nature, which is reflected in the phase diagrams. Usually, these diagrams are obtained from size-exclusion chromatographic (SEC) measurements. A totally novel application, which is exposed in this report, is the construction of the phase diagram from the viscometric experiments of polymer mixtures. The evaluated binodal or cloud-point isotherms so built agree well with those from SEC. The results indicate an augmentation in the dimensions of donor polymer B, in the presence of acceptor polymer C, intensifying with the concentration of C, wh…

Simulation and theory of fluid demixing and interfacial tension of mixtures of colloids and nonideal polymers.

2005

An extension of the Asakura-Oosawa-Vrij model of hard sphere colloids and non-adsorbing polymers, that takes polymer non-ideality into account through a repulsive stepfunction pair potential between polymers, is studied with grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations and density functional theory. Simulation results validate previous theoretical findings for the shift of the bulk fluid demixing binodal upon increasing strength of polymer-polymer repulsion, promoting the tendency to mix. For increasing strength of the polymer-polymer repulsion, simulation and theory consistently predict the interfacial tension of the free colloidal liquid-gas interface to decrease significantly for fixed colloi…

Calculation of phase diagrams not requiring the derivatives of the Gibbs energy for multinary mixtures

1996

A method for the calculation of phase diagrams (tie lines and binodal, spinodal, critical points and their stability) based exclusively on the Gibbs energy of mixing with no need of its derivatives with respect to the composition variables is extended to multinary mixtures for any number of components. The mathematical description of the (K-1)-dimensional phase diagram of a K-component mixture is presented. The method is demonstrated for a quinternary blend of five polymers exhibiting a closed miscibility gap; all binary, ternary and quaternary subsystems are completely miscible. The phase separation in the quinternary system is caused by very favorable interactions in the ternary subsystem…

Liquid/Gas and Liquid/Liquid Phase Equilibria of the System Water/Bovine Serum Albumin

2013

The thermodynamic behavior of the system H2O/BSA was studied at 25 °C within the entire composition range: vapor pressure measurements via head space sampling gas chromatography demonstrate that the attainment of equilibria takes more than one week. A miscibility gap was detected via turbidity and the coexisting phases were analyzed. At 6 °C the two phase region extends from ca. 34 to 40 wt % BSA; it shrinks upon heating. The polymer rich phase is locally ordered, as can be seen under the optical microscope using crossed polarizers. The Flory-Huggins theory turns out to be inappropriate for the modeling of experimental results. A phenomenological expression is employed which uses three adju…

Polydispersity effects on the phase diagram of the system chloroform/poly-l-(lactic acid)/poly(methyl methacrylate) and morphology of PLA/PMMA films

2000

Abstract Cloud point curve, critical composition and several critical coexistence curves were measured at 25°C for the ternary system poly- l -(lactic acid) (PLA), poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) — where both polymers exhibit broad molecular weight distributions — and the common solvent chloroform. In contrast to the situation encountered in the absence of the second polymer both branches of the critical coexistence curves are located without any doubt inside the miscibility gap as defined by the cloud point curve. This unexpected experimental finding is corroborated by model calculations on the basis of continuous thermodynamics. The removal of solvent from the ternary mixtures yields fil…

1984

Provided a polymer is soluble, i. e., molecularly dispersed in another polymer irrespective of the molecular weight of the components, the solution is exothermic. By increasing the temperature two effects, both unfavourable to mixing become larger: (i) the excess entropy of mixing caused by contact interaction and (ii) the total effect from the difference of the free volumes of the pure components. So, an upper miscibility gap occurs. The thermodynamic properties of the mixture cannot be derived from the properties of the pure components. They can be described by the corresponding states theory of Prigogine, Flory, and Patterson with suitable values for the contact energy and contact entrop…

Polymeric alloys: Model materials for the understanding of the statistical thermodynamics of mixtures

1997

Polymeric materials find industrial applications that are comparable to those of metals and ceramics.1 In addition to the great variability via the synthesis of various monomers and the choice of the degree of polymerization (N), alloying of polymers finds increasing attention for combining favorable materials properties.1,2 But polymeric (binary) alloys (A,B) of flexible polymers with chain lengths NA, NB are also most interesting for testing theoretical concepts: changing NA, NB one controls the entropy of mixing, keeping intermolecular forces invariant. Variation of these control parameters thus allows stringent tests of the theories on miscibility, unmixing etc. Furthermore, the large s…