Interactions between colloidal particles in polymer solutions: A density functional theory study.
We present a density functional theory study of colloidal interactions in a concentrated polymer solution. The colloids are modeled as hard spheres and polymers are modeled as freely jointed tangent hard sphere chains. Our theoretical results for the polymer-mediated mean force between two dilute colloids are compared with recent simulation data for this model. Theory is shown to be in good agreement with simulation. We compute the colloid-colloid potential of mean force and the second virial coefficient, and analyze the behavior of these quantities as a function of the polymer solution density, the polymer chain length, and the colloid/polymer bead size ratio.
Patel
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Department of Chemistry, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22901, USA.
Egorov
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SA