Polymer-Solvent Phase Separation and Criticality in the Formation of Porous Polymeric Solids: A Modeling Study

This manuscript describes a model for simulating the properties of polymer-solvent mixtures and the nonequilibrium processes that lead to their demixing and gel formation. In this model, the description of the system is based on a coarse grained lattice model of the polymer density field whose parameters can be chosen to reflect the microscopic characteristics of specific chemical systems. By using a lattice model, we are able to perform block renormalization and thereby access study the critical behavior of these systems upon demixing. We relate this critical behavior to the hierarchical structure of the resulting extended gel-like polymer network.