The Swelling of Olympic Gels

Abstract

The swelling equilibrium of Olympic gels, which are composed of entangled cyclic polymers, is studied by Monte Carlo Simulations. In contrast to chemically crosslinked polymer networks, we observe that Olympic gels made of chains with a \emph{larger} degree of polymerization, $N$, exhibit a \emph{smaller} equilibrium swelling degree, $Q\propto N^{-0.28}{\varphi }_0^{-0.72}$, at the same polymer volume fraction ${\varphi }_0$ at network preparation. This observation is explained by a desinterspersion process of overlapping non-concatenated rings upon swelling.

arXiv commentarXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2103.15480

References in corpus (2)

• Effect of Topology on the Conformations of Ring Polymers
• Ring conformations in bidisperse blends of ring polymers

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Topological Linking Determines Elasticity in Limited Valence Networks
• The Formation and Structure of Olympic Gels
• The effects of non-linear electron-phonon interactions on superconductivity and charge-density-wave correlations
• Computer simulations of melts of ring polymers with non-conserved topology: A dynamic Monte Carlo lattice model
• Arm retraction dynamics in dense polymer brushes
• Olympic Gels: Concatenation and Swelling
• Adsorption of Lattice Polymers with Quenched Topologies