Understanding the
effect of solvent on the polymer conformations
is a fundamental problem in materials science and engineering. Here,
we have developed, the first of its kind, a coarse-grained
(CG) model of poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) that can reproduce its experimental
glass transition temperature (T
g) and
conformation of a single chain in the presence of explicit solvents
along with capturing the structure of solvents at the PAA–solvent
interface. The PAA model was based on a CG model of propionic acid,
an analogue of the PAA monomer. The accuracy of both the propionic
acid and PAA models was validated by employing uncertainty quantifications.
The cross-interaction parameters between CG PAA and one-site water
model and between CG PAA and DMF models were optimized to reproduce
the radius of gyration (R
g) of an all-atom
30-monomer (30-mer) PAA chain in pure solvents. These interaction
parameters were further used to explore the PAA conformation in the
presence of binary mixtures of water and DMF with different compositions.
A PAA chain was in a globule-like and a coil-like state in binary
solvents with low and high mass fractions of DMF, respectively. Moreover,
the local structure of solvent suggests that even at a low mass fraction
of DMF in a binary solvent, there is an enhanced ordering of DMF molecules
at the polymer–solvent interface. Furthermore, an increase
in the coordination number of DMF molecules within the first solvation
shell of PAA suggests that DMF molecules form a shielding layer and
protect PAA from water molecules. These results are in excellent agreement
with the results of all-atom MD simulations.