Role of a polymeric component in the phase separation of ternary fluid mixtures: a dissipative particle dynamics study

Abstract

We present the results from dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) simulations of phase separation dynamics in ternary (ABC) fluids mixture in d = 3 where components A and B represent the simple fluids, and component C represents a polymeric fluid. Here, we study the role of polymeric fluid (C) on domain morphology by varying composition ratio, polymer chain length, and polymer stiffness. We observe that the system under consideration lies in the same dynamical universality class as a simple ternary fluids mixture. However, the scaling functions depend upon the parameters mentioned above as they change the time scale of the evolution morphologies. In all cases, the characteristic domain size follows (t) ∼ t^ϕ with dynamic growth exponent ϕ, showing a crossover from the viscous hydrodynamic regime (ϕ = 1) to the inertial hydrodynamic regime (ϕ = 2/3) in the system at late times.