Physics and Physical Chemistry of Polymer Liquids
Oral Qualifying Exam - Physics and Physical Chemistry of Polymer Liquids
Topics Covered: This exam covers diverse equilibrium physical aspects of synthetic polymers in the liquid phase, including crosslinked rubber networks and liquid crystals
Non-exhaustive list of topics:
- Statistical conformation of individual polymer chains
- Solvent quality, solvent effects, scaling arguments
- Equilibrium behavior of dilute polymer solutions
- Conformation, equilibrium properties and phase behavior of semidilute and concentrated polymer solutions
- Physical mesh, scaling concepts, Flory ideality concept
- Polymer networks and classical rubber elasticity
- Structure of polymers near surfaces: confined fluids, grafted and adsorbed layers
- Phase behavior of liquid crystal forming polymers; rigid rods
- Semiflexible chain models
- Phase separation of polymer blends; chi-parameter, interfacial aspects, Flory-Huggins theory
- Block copolymers and microphase separation; ordered phase morphologies
- Biopolymers
Suggested Texts: There is no comprehensive text for all the material of this course. Some useful books, each of which covers some subset of the topics above, are:
- Rubinstein and Colby, "Polymer Physics"
- Hiemenz and Lodge “Polymer Chemistry”|
Related Course: Students may wish (but are not required) to take:
- MSE 458: Polymer Physics