Issue 11, 2021

Dynamical heterogeneity in the gelation process of a polymer solution with a lower critical solution temperature

Abstract

The gelation of a hydrophobically modified hyaluronic acid aqueous solution which shows a lower critical solution temperature of about 25 °C was investigated by multi-particle tracking microrheology. The linear viscoelasticity of the gelling system is converted from the microrheological data. The critical gelling temperature Tgel = 36.3 °C was determined from the loss tangent by the Winter–Chambon criterion. The critical exponent n = 0.62 was determined from the shift factors of the time–cure superposition. The length scales of the dynamic heterogeneity of the gelling system were analyzed using a proposed framework where single-particle and multi-particle non-Gaussian parameters were compared. The length scale of the dynamic heterogeneous regions monotonically decreases during the gelation process, consistent with the nucleation-and-growth mechanism of phase separation. Distributions of local viscosity in the gelling system were extracted from the observed distributions of particle displacement as a time-dependent fingerprint of the dynamic heterogeneity of the gelling system. The results and analyzing methods proposed in the present work can be applied to other microrheological studies.

Graphical abstract: Dynamical heterogeneity in the gelation process of a polymer solution with a lower critical solution temperature

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
06 Dec 2020
Accepted
31 Jan 2021
First published
02 Feb 2021

Soft Matter, 2021,17, 3222-3233

Dynamical heterogeneity in the gelation process of a polymer solution with a lower critical solution temperature

Y. Dai, R. Zhang, W. Sun, T. Wang, Y. Chen and Z. Tong, Soft Matter, 2021, 17, 3222 DOI: 10.1039/D0SM02159H

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