A monodisperse polymer brush in a polydisperse solvent
Abstract
Even though there has been much work on the behavior of polymer brushes the past decade, the influence of polydispersity in the solvent has not been touched yet. One could imagine a solvent with strong polydispersity as a partly cured thermoset, exhibiting a broad distribution of molecular weights. The low molecular weights will tend to swell the brush, whereas the large ones may tend to compress. What arises from this competition is a brush profile with a shape between a parabola and a step. The choice of exponential distributions allows us to proceed analytically still capturing the phenomenon described above. Using this distribution, we can pass from a parabolic profile to a step in a continuous way.
- Publication:
-
APS March Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- March 1998
- Bibcode:
- 1998APS..MAR.M1306G