Regensburg 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 55: Polymer Dynamics and Rheology (joint session CPP/DY, organized by CPP)

DY 55.12: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 10. März 2016, 18:00–18:15, H40

Co-non-solvency of smart polymers: Physical concepts and computer simulations — •Debashish Mukherji and Kurt Kremer — Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research, Ackermannweg 10, 55128 Mainz, Germany

Smart polymers are a modern class of soft materials that show drastic changes in their physical properties by a slight change in external stimuli. One such phenomenon is known as co-non-solvency. Co-non-solvency occurs when a polymer is added to a mixture of two (perfectly) miscible and competing good solvents. As a result, the same polymer collapses into a globule within intermediate mixing ratios. More interestingly, polymer collapses when the solvent quality remains good or even gets increasingly better by the addition of the better cosolvent [1]. This puzzling phenomenon, where the solvent quality is completely decoupled from the polymer conformation, is driven by strong local preferential adsorption of better cosolvent with the polymer [1,2]. Because a polymer collapses in good solvent, the depletion forces, that are responsible for poor solvent collapse, do not play any role in describing co-non-solvency [3]. Furthermore, it will be presented that this phenomenon can be understood within a universal (generic) concept. Therefore, a broad range of polymers is expected to exhibit co-non-solvency and the specific chemical details do not play any role in understanding these complex conformational behaviors [4].

[1] D. Mukherji and K. Kremer, Macromolecules (2013). [2] D. Mukherji, et al. Nat. Commun. (2014). [3] T. E. de Oliviera, et al., Soft Matter (2015). [4] D. Mukherji, et al, JCP (2015).