Morphology formation in binary mixtures upon gradual destabilisation

TY - JOUR

T1 - Morphology formation in binary mixtures upon gradual destabilisation

AU - Schaefer, Charley

AU - Paquay, Stefan

AU - McLeish, Tom C.B.

N1 - © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2019. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details.

PY - 2019/9/2

Y1 - 2019/9/2

N2 - Spontaneous liquid-liquid phase separation is commonly understood in terms of phenomenological mean-field theories. These theories correctly predict the structural features of the fluid at sufficiently long time scales and wavelengths. However, these conditions are not met in various examples in biology and materials science where the mixture is slowly destabilised, and phase separation is strongly affected by critical thermal fluctuations. We propose a mechanism of pretransitional structuring of a mixture that approaches the miscibility gap and predict scaling relations that describe how the characteristic feature size of the emerging morphology decreases with an increasing quench rate. These predictions quantitatively agree with our kinetic Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations of a phase-separating binary mixture, as well as with previously reported experimental observations. We discuss how these predictions are affected by non-conserved order parameters (e.g., due to chemical reactions or alignment of liquid-crystalline molecules), hydrodynamics and active transport.

AB - Spontaneous liquid-liquid phase separation is commonly understood in terms of phenomenological mean-field theories. These theories correctly predict the structural features of the fluid at sufficiently long time scales and wavelengths. However, these conditions are not met in various examples in biology and materials science where the mixture is slowly destabilised, and phase separation is strongly affected by critical thermal fluctuations. We propose a mechanism of pretransitional structuring of a mixture that approaches the miscibility gap and predict scaling relations that describe how the characteristic feature size of the emerging morphology decreases with an increasing quench rate. These predictions quantitatively agree with our kinetic Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations of a phase-separating binary mixture, as well as with previously reported experimental observations. We discuss how these predictions are affected by non-conserved order parameters (e.g., due to chemical reactions or alignment of liquid-crystalline molecules), hydrodynamics and active transport.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85074305786&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1039/c9sm01344j

DO - 10.1039/c9sm01344j

M3 - Article

C2 - 31490530

AN - SCOPUS:85074305786

SN - 1744-683X

VL - 15

SP - 8450

EP - 8458

JO - Soft Matter

JF - Soft Matter

IS - 42

ER -