Investigation on the application of the TDGL equation in macromolecular microsphere composite hydrogel

Abstract

Here we use the Time-Dependent Ginzburg–Landau (TDGL) mesoscopic model to simulate the phase transition process of macromolecule microsphere composite (MMC) hydrogel. We propose a free energy for such a reticular structure according to the structures of MMC hydrogel and entropy theory. This work generalizes the mean field theory confined by Flory–Huggins for free energy in a polymer blend system. A spectral method is adopted to numerically solve the MMC-TDGL equation. The numerical results are consistent with chemical experiments, showing the network structure. According to the numerical results at different temperatures, we understand that the system shows intermittent phenomenon with increasing reaction temperature, which is a very good explanation of chemical experiments.