Phase Behavior of Polymer-Containing Systems: Recent Advances Through Computer Simulation

Computer simulations dealing with the phase transitions and phase diagrams of polymer solutions, polymer mixtures, and polymers in heterogeneous environments are still a methodological challenge, since nontrivial structure occurs from the Angstrom-scale of covalent chemical bonds to the micrometer scale in the resulting multiphase materials. A brief review of strategies that were developed to deal with these problems will be given, and a few highlights of recent results from the research groups of the authors will be described.