Molecular imaging of shear -induced polymer migration near a surface in dilute and semidilute solutions.

Abstract

The goal of our research is to optically visualize shear-induced polymer migration near a surface on the single molecular level, and to enhance current understanding of interactions between flowing polymer solutions with surfaces. By using epi-fluorescence microscopy, we measured the mean fractional stretch and concentrations of lambda-phage DNA molecules above a glass surface in shear flows in a microchannel and a torsional shear cell. We find that DNA molecules are driven away to create a depletion layer near the surface. The shear-induced migration is enhanced with a larger depletion layer at high Weissenberg number (Wi), in qualitative agreement with theories. We proposed a simple mechanism for this shear-induced migration based on hydrodynamic interaction (HI) between the surface and polymer chains. We find that the thickness of depletion layer of lambda-phage DNA molecules is about 10mum at Wi = 10.3, which is thinner than in the predictions for the FENE-P dumbbell model [Ma and Graham (2005)] and in Brownian dynamics simulations. The discrepancies suggest that current theoretical models of the polymer migration phenomenon are incomplete. We find that the time scale of DNA migration is on the order of the diffusion time over the distance of depletion layer, and that the mean fractional stretch of DNA molecules decreases near the surface over this same time scale. Experiments with deliberately fragmented DNA indicate that the decrease in mean fractional stretch near the surface might be caused by the selective retention of fragments in the DNA solution owing to weaker HI effects between the surface and shorter polymer chains. The shear-induced migration of DNA molecules exists in diminished form up to 3.0 c* (c* is the overlap concentration), implying that: in the traditionally defined dilute regime (c < c*), screening of wall hydrodynamics occurs over DNA concentration from 0.1 c* to 1.0 c*; and in the semidilute regime (c > c*); while the chains are overlapping, they do not screen out HI completely up to 3.0 c*.