2019, Münch, Andreas, Wagner, Barbara

The most successful mean-field model to describe the collective behaviour of the large class of macromolecular polymers is the self-consistent field theory (SCFT). Still, even for the simple system of a grafted dry polymer brush, the mean-field equations have to be solved numerically. As one of very few alternatives that offer some analytical tractability the strong-stretching theory (SST) has led to explicit expressions for the effective chemical potential and consequently the free energy to promote an understanding of the underlying physics. Yet, a direct derivation of these analytical results from the SCFT model is still outstanding. In this study we present a systematic asymptotic theory based on matched asymtptotic expansions to obtain the effective chemical potential from the SCFT model for a dry polymer brush for large but finite stretching.

2009, Dreyer, Wolfgang, Guhlke, Clemens, Huth, Robert

We study the almost reversible storage process of charging and discharging of lithium-ion batteries. That process is accompanied by a phase transition and charging and discharging run along different paths, so that hysteretic behavior is observed. We are interested in the storage problem of the cathode of a lithium-ion battery consisting of a system of many iron phosphate (FePO4) particles. There are mathematical models, see [DGJ08], [DGGHJ09] and [DG09], that describe phase transitions and hysteresis exclusively in a single storage particle and they can describe the observed hysteretic voltage-charge plots with almost horizontal plateaus. Interestingly the models predict that the coexistence of a 2-phase system in an individual particle disappears, if its size is below a critical value. The disappearance of the phase transition in the single particle model implies the disappearance of the hysteresis. However, in the experiment hysteretic behavior survives. In other words: The behavior of a storage system consisting of many particles is qualitatively independent of the fact whether the individual particles itself develop a 2-phase system or if they remain in a single phase state. This apparent paradoxical observation will be resolved in this article by a many particle model. It will be shown that if each of the individual particles is in a homogeneous state, nevertheless the many particle ensemble exhibits phase transition and hysteresis ...