Ionic and pH effects on the osmotic properties and structure of polyelectrolyte gels |
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Authors: | Ferenc Horkay Peter J Basser |
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Institution: | Section on Tissue Biophysics and Biomimetics, Laboratory of Integrative and Medical Biophysics, NICHD, National Institutes of Health, 13 South Drive, Bethesda, Maryland 20892 |
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Abstract: | We investigate the effects of salt concentration and pH on neutralized poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) gels in near physiological salt solutions. Either adding calcium ions or decreasing the pH is found to induce reversible volume transitions but the nature of these transitions seems to be different. For example, the osmotic pressure exhibits a simple power law dependence on the concentration as the transition is approached in both systems, but the power law exponent n is substantially different in the two cases. On decreasing the pH the value of n gradually increases from 2.1 (at pH = 7) to 3.2 (at pH = 1). By contrast, n decreases with increasing calcium ion concentration from 2.1 (in 100 mM NaCl solution) to 1.6 (0.8 mM CaCl2 in 100 mM NaCl solution). In both systems, a strong increase of the small-angle neutron scattering intensity (SANS) is observed near the volume transition. The SANS results reveal that calcium ions favor the formation of linearly aligned regions in PAA gels. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 46: 2803–2810, 2008 |
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Keywords: | neutron scattering osmotic pressure phase behavior phase transition polyelectrolyte gel polyelectrolytes small-angle neutron scattering |
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