Phase diagram of mixtures of colloids and polymers in the thermal crossover from good to $\theta$ solvent

Abstract

We determine the phase diagram of mixtures of spherical colloids and neutral nonadsorbing polymers in the thermal crossover region between the $\theta$ point and the good-solvent regime. We use the generalized free-volume theory (GFVT), which turns out to be quite accurate as long as $q=R_g/R_c\lesssim 1$ ($R_g$ is the radius of gyration of the polymer and $R_c$ is the colloid radius). Close to the $\theta$ point the phase diagram is not very sensitive to solvent quality, while, close to the good-solvent region, changes of the solvent quality modify significantly the position of the critical point and of the binodals. We also analyze the phase behavior of aqueous solutions of charged colloids and polymers, using the extension of GFVT proposed by Fortini et al., J. Chem. Phys. 128, 024904 (2008).

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Coarse-graining polymer solutions: a critical appraisal of single- and multi-site models
• Accurate coarse-grained models for mixtures of colloids and linear polymers under good-solvent conditions
• Polymer models with optimal good-solvent behavior
• Integral-equation analysis of single-site coarse-grained models for polymer-colloid mixtures