Instabilities in thin films of polymers - Counterions density around a loaded porous cell
The first part of this Ph.D. Thesis is focused on the instabilities in thin polymer films.
The studied instabilities is the instabilities under electric field perpendicular to the film surface occurring when the temperature becomes higher to the glass temperature.
In particular, we study the influence of residual stresses on the growing rate and on the selected wavenumber.
We start by describing the fabrication process of thin film and we explain why we introduce residual stresses. Then, every hypothesis of our model is commented. Three rheological models are tested : a non-linear elastic Neo-Hookean solid, a viscoelastic Voigt-Kelvin solid and a viscoelastic Maxwell fluid.
In the second part, we study the counterions density around a hydrophobic polyelectrolyte. In a bad solvent, this kind of polyelectrolyte can adopt a pearlnecklage structure. The counterions density is determined around one pearl of this structure. The quasi-localized charges approximation allows us to get scaling laws between the coupling parameter and the decay length and between the coupling parameter and the uptake charge. The scaling laws were proved with numerical simulations. An other theory, the Density Functional Theory, is also tested on this system and it shows a good agreement between all methods.