Adsorption of poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) on silica. II. The fraction of bound segments, measured by a variety of techniques

The adsorption of the flexible, linear, and nonionic homopolymer poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) from water and from 1,4-dioxane onto pyrogenic silica was studied. Results are reported for the adsorbed amount as a function of adsorption time, molecular mass, and molecular mass distribution (polydispersity). It is found that the adsorption of fractionated samples can be qualitatively explained by the recent theory of Scheutjens and Fleer. However, the influence of the solvent type is larger than predicted by this theory, and an extension of the model to account for this influence is suggested. The polydispersity effects encountered in adsorption isotherms are satisfactorily accounted for by a theory published by Cohen Stuart, Scheutjens, and Fleer.     

Effect of stoichiometry on liquid crystalline supramolecular polymers formed with complementary nucleobase pair interactions

We report herein studies on the liquid crystalline behavior of a series of supramolecular materials that contain different ratios of two complementary symmetrically-substituted alkoxy-bis(phenylethynyl)benzene AA- and BB-type monomers. One monomer has thymine units placed at either end of the rigid mesogenic core, while the other has N⁶-(4-methoxybenzoyl)-adenine units placed on the ends. Differential scanning calorimetric and polarized optical microscopy studies have been carried out on these systems. These studies show that the material's behavior is strongly dependent on its thermal history. As a result, the materials can exhibit, on heating, either a liquid crystalline phase, a crystalline phase, or the coexistence of crystalline and liquid crystalline regions. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 44: 5049–5059, 2006     

Wetting at a polymer gel–vapor interface; a system not influenced by a long-range van der Waals contribution

The exterior of a cross-linked polymer gel resembles a polymer brush. Such gel including its brush can be swollen by a good solvent. The detachment of the solvent–vapor (L–V) interface from the brush is controlled by the adsorption of polymer segments onto this interface and is to a very good approximation not influenced by long-range van der Waals contributions. A wetting transition in this system coincided with the adsorption–desorption transition for chains onto such L–V interface and has various unusual features. There are several indications that in practice this system should feature a second-order wetting transition.     

Partial regularity for minimisers of certain functionals having nonquadratic growth

We prove partial regularity results for local minimisers of