Van' t Hoff Laboratory, Debye Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
J Phys Condens Matter. 2011 May 18;23(19):194113. doi: 10.1088/0953-8984/23/19/194113. Epub 2011 Apr 27.
Theory is presented for the phase stability of mixtures containing nanospheres and non-adsorbing reversible supramolecular polymers. This was made possible by incorporating the depletion thickness and osmotic pressure of reversible supramolecular polymer chains into generalized free-volume theory, recently developed for investigating the phase behaviour of colloidal spheres mixed with interacting polymers (Fleer and Tuinier 2008 Adv. Colloid Interface Sci. 143 1-47). It follows that the fluid-fluid phase stability region where reversible supramolecular polymer chains can be mixed with nanospheres is sensitive to the energy of scission between the monomers and to the nanoparticle radius. One can then expect the fluid-fluid coexistence curves to have a strong dependence on temperature and that shifting of phase boundaries within a single experimental system should be possible by varying the temperature. The calculations reveal the width of the stability region to be rather small. This implies that phase homogeneity of product formulations containing reversible supramolecular polymers is only possible at low nanoparticle concentrations.
提出了一种理论，用于研究含有纳米球和非吸附可逆超分子聚合物的混合物的相稳定性。这是通过将可逆超分子聚合物链的耗尽厚度和渗透压纳入广义自由体积理论来实现的，该理论最近被开发用于研究与相互作用聚合物混合的胶体球的相行为（Fleer 和 Tuinier，2008 年，《高级胶体界面科学》，143 卷，第 1-47 页）。因此，可逆超分子聚合物链可以与纳米球混合的流体-流体相稳定区域对单体之间的断裂能和纳米颗粒半径敏感。然后，可以预期流体-流体共存曲线对温度有很强的依赖性，并且通过改变温度，在单个实验系统内移动相界应该是可能的。计算表明稳定性区域的宽度相当小。这意味着含有可逆超分子聚合物的产品配方的相均一性仅在纳米颗粒浓度较低时才有可能。
