Monte Carlo Simulation Studies of Regular and Irregular Dendritic Polymers

A dynamic Monte Carlo method was employed to study regular as well as irregular dendrimers with up to G = 8 generations with functionality F = 3 under athermal conditions. The size of dendrimers showed the same scaling law with respect to chain-length n as linear chains, keeping G at a constant value. If n was varied via G at fixed spacer-length m its scaling behavior was similar to that of collapsed globules, at least for large values of G. Asphericity strongly decreased with an increase of G. The composition of irregular dendrimers remained unchanged with respect to F and G but the spacer-lengths were distributed according to several models. Quite generally, distributions became broader, size larger and shape less symmetric compared to the regular case. These effects increased with an increase of dispersity of the branches.