Dynamics Of Rigid And Flexible Polymer Chains Transport Through Confined Geometries Electrohydrodynamics

This volume contains reviews on state-of-the-art Japanese research presented in the annual Spring and Autumn meetings of the Japanese Polymer Science Society. The aim of this section is to make information on the progress of Japanese Polymer Science, and on topics of current interest to polymer scientists in Japan, more easily available worldwide.

The behavior of polymer solutions in simple shear flows has been the subject of considerable research in the past. On the other hand, reports on polymers in elongational flow have appeared comparatively recently in the literature. Elongational flow with an inherent low vorticity is known to be more effective in extending polymer chains than simple shear flow and thus is more interesting from the point of view of basic (molecular chain dynamics at high deformation) and applied polymer science (rheology, fiber extrusion, drag reduction, flow through porous media). Undoubtly, one landmark in the field of polymer dynamics in elongational flow was the notion of critical strain-rate for chain extension, initially put forward by A. Peterlin (1966) and later refined into the "coil-stretching" transition by P. G. de Gennes and H. Hinch (1974). In the two decades which followed, significant progress in the understanding of chain conformation in "strong" flow has been accomplished through a combination of advances in instrumentation, computation techniques and theoretical studies. As a result of the multidisciplinary nature of the field, information on polymer chains in "strong" flow is accessible only from reviews and research papers scattered in disparate scientific journals. An important objective of this book is to remedy that situation by providing the reader with up-to-date knowledge in a single volume. The editors therefore invited leading specialists to provide both fundamental and applied information on the multiple facets of chain deformation in elongational flow.

A new and general model, called the "helical wormlike chain," for both flexible and semi-flexible polymer chains is presented. Statistical-mechanical, hydrodynamic, and dynamic theories of their solution properties are developed on the basis of this model. There are also given analysis of recent experimental data by the use of these theories for flexible polymers over a wide range of molecular weight, including the oligomer region, and for semi-flexible polymers, including biological macromolecules such as DNA. The book includes a reasonable number of theoretical equations, tables, figures, and computer-aided forms, enough to provide understanding of the basic theory and to facilitate its application to experimental data for the polymer molecular characterization.