Abstract
Polymer density-functional theories(PDFTs)have distinct advantages in the study of polyelectrolyte(PE)systems over experiments and molecular simulations.Here we give an introductory review of some PDFTs recently developed for PE systems.We start with a general formal-ism of PDFTs and its relation to the widely used polymer self-consistent field theory(SCFT),then explain the various correlations that are neglect-ed in SCFT but can be accounted for in PDFTs,including those due to the excluded-volume interaction and chain connectivity of uncharged poly-mers,the electrostatic correlations of small ions,and the chain correlations in PEs.We also list some applications of PDFTs for PE systems,and fi-nally give some perspectives on future work.We hope that our review can attract more researchers to apply and further develop PDFTs as a promising class of theoretical and computational tools.
基金项目
National Natural Science Foundation of China(22173051)
National Natural Science Foundation of China(21829301)
donors of The American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund()