Concentration dependence of the viscoelastic properties of polymer solutions

Abstract

A heuristic summary is provided of the multiple-scattering representation of the concentration dependence of the viscoelastic properties of polymer solutions in the form of both a concentration cluster expansion and an effective medium theory. The essential role of and complications introduced by the dynamics of the bead–bead correlation function are described and are studied by a full treatment of the leading concentration dependence of the friction coefficients, the polymer relaxation rates and the polymer normal-mode autocorrelation function. Specific behaviour is illustrated by exact solutions for two and three bead models, while numerical solutions are given for chains of up to twenty beads.