Supramolecular Bonds, Phase Equilibrium, and Self-Assembly in Telechelic Polymer Blends*

We study a binary blend of telechelic homopolymers that can form reversible AB-type bonds at chain ends. Previous studies of reversibly-bonding polymer systems have been limited by the computational demand of accounting for an infinite number of possible reaction products in a spatially inhomogeneous self-assembled structure. We demonstrate that newly developed theoretical models and numerical methods enable the simultaneous computation of phase equilibrium, reaction equilibrium and self-assembly via self-consistent field theory. Phase diagrams are computed at a variety of physically relevant conditions and are compared with non-reactive analogues. We briefly survey future work that extends these methods to network-forming polymers.