Theory of phase separation kinetics in polymer-liquid crystal systems
C. B. Muratov and W. E
We introduce a kinetic model describing the phase separation in the
mixture of long rod-like molecules and long chain-like molecules. The
model uses the angular distribution function for the orientations of
the rods as a dynamical variable. The energetics is based on the
non-local Onsager theory for the rods combined with a non-local
extension of the Flory-Huggins theory. The kinetics explicitly takes
into account the preferential diffusion along the rods. We computed
the phase diagrams in this model and found a number of transitions
leading to phase separation. We also performed numerical simulations
of the phase separation kinetics and studied the resulting
morphologies.
Movies from the simulations:
Movie1: phi = 0.5
Movie2: phi = 0.7
Movie3: phi = 0.2
Movie4: phi = 0.7, early stage
Movie5: phi = 0.5, early stage