The self-consistent field study of the adsorption of flexible homo-polymers onto two neutral cylindrical objects

Using the continuum self-consistent field theory (SCFT), the adsorption of flexible homo-polymers onto the surfaces of two identical cylinders immersed in a neutral polymer solution is studied. The effects of various system parameters (the chain length, the radius of the cylinders, the number density of objects, the intensity of short-region field, etc.) on the bridging chain conformation and the total amount of the adsorbed chains are investigated. The efficient multigrid method is adopted to solve the modified diffusion equation. The “masking” technique is applied to deal with the interface between the cylinders and the polymer solution, which enables the use of the Cartesian grid. Simulation results show that, the total amount of the adsorbed chains scales linearly with respect to the radius of the cylinders. On the other hand, the total amount of the bridging chain conformation does not follow a linear scaling relation with the radius of the cylinder due to the curvature effect of the cylinders. Simulation results reveal that, the total amount of the bridging chain conformation increases with both the chain length and the strength of the short-range attractive interaction between the object surface and the monomers, but eventually saturates.