Phase separation in polyisoprene/polystyrene blends by a systematically coarse-grained model

The authors have successfully developed a structurally coarse-grained 1,4-cis-polyisoprene-atactic polystyrene blend model by systematic mapping between a detailed atomistic model and a mesoscale model. This is to their best knowledge the first time that a chemically specific polymer blend model has been used to study the phase separation morphology and kinetics in a blend. A structurally optimized force-field model has many advantages over simple bead-spring models in terms of representing the chain microstructure. It keeps the identity of the polymers, particularly the structure through radial distribution functions. Starting from randomly mixed initial configurations, the blends show a clear phase separation for chain lengths around 10 monomers and this separation becomes more pronounced with the increase of chain length. The ensuing morphology is lamellar at equiweight concentrations and cylindrical or spherical at unbalanced concentrations. Morphologies are validated to be stable under increasing system sizes and further characterized quantitatively by density profiles.