Self-Consistent Field Approach for Crosslinked Copolymer Materials

Abstract

A generalized self-consistent field approach for polymer networks with fixed topology is developed. It is shown that the theory reproduces the localization of crosslinks which is characteristic for gels. The theory is then used to study the order-disorder transition in regular networks of endlinked diblock copolymers. Compared to diblock copolymer melts, the transition is shifted towards lower values of the incompatibility parameter $\chi$ (the Flory- Huggins parameter). Moreover, the transition becomes strongly first order already at the mean-field level. If stress is applied, the transition is further shifted and finally vanishes in a critical point.

Includes supplemental information

References in corpus (3)

• Spontaneous formation of complex micelles from homogeneous solution
• Hydrodynamic Self-Consistent Field Theory for Inhomogeneous Polymer Melts
• Microphase separation in cross-linked polymer blends: Efficient replica RPA post-processing of simulation data for homopolymer networks

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Efficient sampling of reversible cross-linking polymers: Self-assembly of single-chain polymeric nanoparticles
• Unconventionally Fast Transport through Sliding Dynamics of Rodlike Particles in Macromolecular Networks
• A new configurational bias scheme for sampling supramolecular structures
• Statistical field theory for nonlinear elasticity of polymer networks with excluded volume interactions