2004/09/30 by Pawel Bryk, Paweł Bryk
Chemical Engineering · Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Material Dynamics and Properties #Phase Equilibria and Thermodynamics #Rheology and Fluid Dynamics Studies #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.1844331
published as J. Chem. Phys, 122, 064902 (2005) · 11 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2004/09/30 · openalex publication_date 2005/01/24 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the structure and interfacial properties of model athermal mixtures of colloids and excluded volume polymers. The colloid particles are modeled as hard spheres whereas the polymer coils are modeled as chains formed from tangentially bonded hard spheres. Within the framework of the nonlocal density functional theory we study the influence of the chain length on the surface tension and the interfacial width. We find that the interfacial tension of the colloid-interacting polymer mixtures increases with the chain length and is significantly smaller than that of the ideal polymers. For certain parameters we find oscillations on the colloid-rich parts of the density profiles of both colloids and polymers with the oscillation period of the order of the colloid diameter. The interfacial width is few colloid diameters wide and also increases with the chain length. We find the interfacial width for the end segments to be larger than that for the middle segments and this effect is more pronounced for longer chains.