Talk by Dr Ravi Prakash
The behaviour of collapsed homopolymers and diblock copolymers subjected to extensional flow is examined using fluctuating hydrodynamic simulations. The copolymer blocks are labeled H and P to represent hydrophobic and hydrophilic interactions with the solvent. Collapsed homopolymers are found to undergo a transition in their conformational state from a globular to a stretched state at a critical Weissenberg number. The existence of globule-stretch hysteresis is also demonstrated with the width of the globule-stretch hysteresis window depending significantly on the quality of the solvent.