Gelation in model colloid-polymer mixtures

By J. Bergenholtz, W. Poon, M. Fuchs. 2003

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Mode coupling theory (MCT) is used to model gel formation in mixtures of colloidal particles and nonadsorbing polymer. The polymer induces an effective, short-range attraction among the colloids, which is modeled by a depletion attraction of the Asakura-Oosawa form. This enables the MCT to be solved analytically for dilute systems, leading to a prediction, free of adjustable parameters, of the location of the gel boundary in the phase diagram. For concentrated systems, a simple mapping is suggested that makes a previous theory for Yukawa interactions applicable to colloid-polymer mixtures. The results are compared against Monte Carlo simulations and experiments on model systems. Excellent agreement is observed at high colloid concentrations, where the theory predicts melting of glassy structures on addition of small amounts of polymer. Further addition of polymer causes gelation, in semiquantitative accord with experimental data at moderate to high colloid concentrations. However, at lower concentrations the theory is unable to capture the onset of transient gelation.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Organic Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7529fcf395c92bceaa4959053b98f8600f9c84b

How researchers see this paper

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In Biomedical Engineering

1. G. Petekidis
2. S. Egelhaaf
3. M. Laurati
4. L. Ramos
5. L. Cipelletti

In Materials Chemistry

1. G. Petekidis
2. S. Egelhaaf
3. M. Laurati
4. L. Cipelletti
5. L. Ramos
6. W. Poon

In Organic Chemistry

1. S. Egelhaaf
2. G. Petekidis
3. M. Laurati

Citations in the corpus

• Slow dynamics in glassy soft matter (2005, background): “ote, however, that for these soft objects the difference in G 0 for attractive and repulsive glasses (about a factor of 2) is much less marked than for attractive hard spheres (more than a decade, see [63]). The melting of a glass of soft spheres (star polymers) and a reentrant gelation upon the addi”
• Nonlinear rheology of colloidal gels with intermediate volume fraction (2011, methodology): “The location of the transition from fluid to an attractive glass or gel can be predicted by mode-coupling theory MCT and s consistent with experiments Bergenholtz et al. 2003 ; Laurati et al. 2009 ; Shah et l. 2003b .”
• Equilibrium cluster formation in concentrated protein solutions and colloids (2004, methodology): “The emerging glass paradigm has been successfully applied to complex soft-matter systems, such as colloid–polymer system”