Entropy Driven Phase Transition in Polymer Gels: Mean Field Theory

Entropy Driven Phase Transition in Polymer Gels: Mean Field Theory

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We present a mean field model of a gel consisting of P polymers, each of length L and Nz polyfunctional monomers.Each polyfunctional monomer forms z covalent bonds with the 2P bifunctional monomers at Hand Balm the ends of the linear polymers.We find that the entropy dependence on the number of polyfunctional monomers exhibits T-Shirt an abrupt change at Nz = 2P/z due to the saturation of possible crosslinks.This non-analytical dependence of entropy on the number of polyfunctionals generates a first-order phase transition between two gel phases: one poor and the other rich in poly-functional molecules.