Abstract
The gelation mechanism of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide)−clay nanocomposite gels (NC gel) was investigated by dynamic light scattering (DLS) and contrast variation small-angle neutron scattering (SANS). It was found that the gelation mechanism of NC gels is similar to that of conventional gels made with organic cross-linker (OR gels). Namely, time-resolved DLS measurements captured all of the characteristic features of gelation at the threshold. This indicates that the gelation of NC gels is also classified to an ergode−nonergode transition. However, the size of the clusters at the gelation threshold is much larger than that of OR gels. This results in a significant depression of optical transmittance exclusively at the gelation threshold for NC gels. Partial scattering functions, i.e., two self-terms SPP(q) and SCC(q) and the corresponding cross-term SCP(q), were obtained by contrast-variation SANS, where P and C denote polymer and clay, respectively, and q is the magnitude of the scattering vector. The det...
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