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Updated: May 10, 2026

Fabricating Superhydrophobic Polymeric Materials for Biomedical Applications
Published on: August 28, 2015
Comb polymers in dilute solutions: Analytical approach, computer simulations, and experiments
Khristine Haydukivska1, Viktoria Blavatska1, Daniel Gromadzki2
1Yukhnovskii Institute for Condensed Matter Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 79011 Lviv, Ukraine.
Abstract:
We analyze the universal conformational properties of comblike polymer topologies in the dilute-solution regime. To this end, we evaluate the effective radii of gyration of polymer structures across a range of parameters, including the number of branching points n, the functionality f (the number of grafted side chains in addition to the backbone), and the relative polymerization degree a, defined as the ratio between the degrees of polymerization of the backbone spacer and the grafted side chains. We combine an analytical approach based on the continuous-chain model and direct polymer renormalization with coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations and comparison with available experimental data. In particular, we quantitatively estimate the increase in the effective size of comb structures with increasing relative polymerization degree a. Our analytical results show good qualitative agreement with both the simulations and the available experimental data for monodisperse homopolymer combs.
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