title: Effective interaction parameter of linear/star polymer blends and comparison with that of linear/linear and star/star blends.
abstract: The authors present a detailed study of the microscopic parameters, which control the miscibility in binary linear/star polymer blends. The effective interactions of linear/star polymer blends are studied by means of Monte Carlo simulations and comparison is made with linear/linear and star/star blends, which they also determined. Using the bond fluctuation model on a simple cubic lattice, the authors are able to simulate symmetric linear/linear, star/star, and, for the first time, linear/star blends with a moderate number of arms. The simulations were performed at a volume fraction of occupied lattice sites phi=0.5, which corresponds to dense polymer mixtures for this algorithm. In particular, we study star/star blends with 4, 8, and 12 arms and the respective linear/linear blends as well as linear/star blends, all having the same total number of units equal to 73 and 121. The authors find that linear/star blends are more miscible than the corresponding linear/linear blends, which is in agreement with recent experimental and theoretical results. They find that linear/star mixtures are less miscible than star/star blends, a result which is also verified by theoretical findings.
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, 45110 Ioannina, Greece.
authors.forename: P E
authors.initials: PE
authors.lastname: Theodorakis
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Avgeropoulos
authors.forename: J J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Freire
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kosmas
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Vlahos