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Updated: Jul 15, 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
Effective interaction parameter of linear/star polymer blends and comparison with that of linear/linear and star/star
P E Theodorakis1, A Avgeropoulos, J J Freire
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, 45110 Ioannina, Greece.
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.
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