Self‐diffusion coefficient of ring polymers in semidilute solution |
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| Authors: | Balaji V. S. Iyer Sachin Shanbhag Vinay A. Juvekar Ashish K. Lele |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Polymer Science and Engineering Division, National Chemical Laboratory, Pune 411 008, India;2. Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT‐Powai, Mumbai 400 076, India;3. Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, FAMU‐FSU College of Engineering, Tallahassee, Florida‐32310‐6046;4. School of Computational Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida‐32306‐4120 |
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| Abstract: | In a topologically constraining environment the size of a flexible nonconcatenated ring polymer (macrocycles) and its dynamics are known to differ from that of linear polymers. Hence, the diffusion coefficient of ring polymers can be expected to be different from linear chains. We present here scaling arguments for the concentration and molecular weight dependence of self‐diffusion coefficient of ring polymers in semidilute solutions, and show that contrary to expectations these scaling relations are identical to what is known for linear polymers. At higher concentrations excluded volume interactions arising from possibilities of segmental overlap can become effective for large ring polymers. In this regime the diffusion coefficient of large ring polymers shows a relatively weaker dependence on concentration and molecular weight. ©2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 46: 2370–2379, 2008 |
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| Keywords: | diffusion macrocycles Monte Carlo simulation |
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