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Updated: Aug 17, 2026

Synthesis of Cyclic Polymers and Characterization of Their Diffusive Motion in the Melt State at the Single Molecule Level
Published on: September 26, 2016
Effect of attractive interactions on the structure of polymer melts confined between surfaces: a density-functional
Teena Goel1, Chandra N Patra, Swapan K Ghosh
1Theoretical Chemistry Section, Radiation Chemistry and Chemical Dynamics Division, Chemistry Group, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai 400 085, India.
Abstract:
A density-functional theory is presented to study the structure of polymers, having attractive interactions, confined between attractive surfaces. The theory treats the ideal-gas free-energy functional exactly and uses weighted density approximation for the hard-chain contribution to the excess free-energy functional. The bulk interactions of freely jointed hard spheres are obtained from generalized Flory equation of state and the attractive interactions are calculated using the direct correlation function obtained from the polymer reference interaction site model theory along with the mean spherical approximation closure. The theoretical predictions are found to be in quite good agreement with the Monte Carlo simulation results for varying densities, chain lengths, and different interaction potentials. The results confirm important implications of using different approximations for the hard-sphere and attractive interactions.
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