Polymer statistics. IV. Simulation of adsorption of polymers and polyelectrolytes on surfaces

Simulation of bulk polymer configurations introduced in paper II of this series is extended to both neutral polymers and polyelectrolytes adsorbed on a substrate. The simulation is based on the analytical output of the equilibrium calculations of the cluster variational method (CVM) described in the preceding paper. The polymers described in the simulation are polydisperse. In the simulations, we measure the following quantities: the distribution of the adsorbed polymers on the surface as a function of the polymer length (molecular weight), the end-to-end distance, the maximum height, the average thickness of adsorbed polymers, the area covered by adsorbed segments, the fraction of segments in trains, tails and loops, and the probabilities that the adsorbed linear polymers show zero, one and two tails. Noteworthy results are: (1) long polymers are adsorbed more frequently than short ones, and (ii) adsorbed polyelectrolytes are flat on the surface, and hence practically no loops appear in them. © 1992.

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