Issue 10, 2009

Polyelectrolytes in electric fields: measuring the dynamical effective charge and effective friction

Abstract

We use a coarse-grained molecular dynamics model to study the electrophoretic behaviour of flexible polyelectrolyte chains. We first characterize the static properties of the model with respect to the chain length, the polyelectrolyte concentration, additional salt and the influence of an applied external field. Next we investigate the dynamic behaviour in the oligomer range and find excellent correspondence of simulations to experimental observations when hydrodynamic interactions are accounted for in the simulations. We then present novel estimators for the dynamical effective charge during free-solution electrophoresis and compare them to static estimators. We find complete agreement between the static and the dynamic estimators. We further evaluate the scaling behaviour of the effective friction of the polyelectrolyte-counterion complex with the surrounding fluid. We identify a hydrodynamic screening length beyond which the friction during electrophoresis is linear depending on the chain length resulting in a constant mobility for long polyelectrolyte chains. Our results show a convincing agreement with experimental data and demonstrate that it is possible to model dynamic behaviour of polyelectrolytes using coarse-grained models, provided they include the effects of hydrodynamical interactions.

Graphical abstract: Polyelectrolytes in electric fields: measuring the dynamical effective charge and effective friction

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
15 Dec 2008
Accepted
05 Mar 2009
First published
03 Apr 2009

Soft Matter, 2009,5, 2079-2092

Polyelectrolytes in electric fields: measuring the dynamical effective charge and effective friction

K. Grass and C. Holm, Soft Matter, 2009, 5, 2079 DOI: 10.1039/B822276B

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements