Self-assembly and glass-formation in a lattice model of telechelic polymer melts: Influence of stiffness of the sticky bonds

TL;DR

This paper extends a lattice cluster theory model for telechelic polymers by incorporating semiflexible sticky bonds, revealing how bond stiffness affects self-assembly and glass formation in polymer melts.

Contribution

It introduces a new theoretical model allowing the sticky bonds to have adjustable stiffness, enhancing understanding of their role in polymer self-assembly and thermodynamics.

Findings

Sticky bond stiffness significantly influences self-assembly behavior.

The model provides analytical expressions for free energy in telechelic polymer melts.

Bond rigidity impacts glass-formation properties of the polymers.

Abstract

The lattice cluster theory (LCT) for strongly interacting, self-assembling telechelic polymers provides a theoretical tool that enables establishing the connections between important microscopic molecular details of self-assembling polymers and their bulk thermodynamics. The original LCT for self-assembly of telechelic polymers considers a model of fully flexible linear chains [J. Dudowicz and K. F. Freed, J. Chem. Phys. \textbf{136}, 064902 (2012)], while our recent work introduces a significant improvement to the LCT by including a description of chain semiflexibility for the bonds within each individual telecheic chain [W.-S. Xu and K. F. Freed, J. Chem. Phys. \textbf{143}, 024901 (2015)], but the physically associative (or called "sticky") bonds between the ends of the telechelics are left as fully flexible. Motivated by the ubiquitous presence of steric constraints on the association of real telechelic polymers that impart an additional degree of bond stiffness (or rigidity), the present paper further extends the LCT to permit the sticky bonds to be semiflexible but to have a stiffness differing from that within each telechelic chain. An analytical expression for the Helmholtz free energy is provided for this model of linear telechelic polymer melts, and illustrative calculations demonstrate the significant influence of the stiffness of the sticky bonds on the self-assembly and thermodynamics of telechelic polymers. A brief discussion is also provided for the impact of self-assembly on glass-formation by combining the LCT description for this extended model of telechelic polymers with the Adam-Gibbs relation between the structural relaxation time and the configurational entropy.