Effective interaction parameter of linear/star polymer blends and comparison with that of linear/linear and star/star blends

摘要

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.