Artistic rendering of a polymer chain containing a molecular force probe (central structure) being distorted by the flow field around an imploding cavitation bubble (central circle). Image: Professor Roman Boulatov, University of Liverpool.Chemists at the University of Liverpool in the UK have achieved an important breakthrough in the field of polymer science. In a paper in Nature Chemistry, they report using mechanochemistry to characterize how a polymer chain in solution responds to a sudden acceleration of the solvent flow around it. This allowed them to finally answer a fundamental and technological question that has preoccupied polymer scientists for almost 50 years.
Since the 1980s, researchers have been trying to understand the unique response of dissolved polymer chains to suddenly accelerating solvent flows. But they had been constrained to highly simplified solvent flows that provided limited exploitable insights into the behaviour of real-world systems.
The new discovery by Liverpool chemists Roman Boulatov and Robert O'Neill has significant scientific implications for several areas of physical science. At a practical level, it also has implications for the polymer-based rheological control used in many multi-million-dollar industrial processes, including enhanced oil and gas recovery, long distance piping and photovoltaics manufacturing.
“Our finding addresses a fundamental and technical question in polymer science and potentially upends our current understanding of chain behaviour in cavitational solvent flows,” said Boulatov.
“Our proof-of-the-approach demonstration reveals that our understanding of how polymer chains respond to sudden accelerations of solvent flows in cavitating solutions was too simplistic to support systematic design of new polymer structures and compositions for efficient and economical rheological control in such scenarios or for gaining fundamental molecular insights into flow-induced mechanochemistry,” said O’Neill.
“Our paper has important implications for our ability to study non-equilibrium polymer chain dynamics at the molecular length scales, and thus our capacity to answer fundamental questions of how energy flows between molecules and within them, and how it transforms from kinetic to potential to free energies.”
The research team now plans to focus on expanding the scope and capabilities of their new method and exploiting it to map molecular-level physics that would allow accurate predictions of flow behavior for an arbitrary combination of polymer, solvent and flow conditions.
This story is adapted from material from the University of Liverpool, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.