A Framework for Exploring the Post-gelation Behavior of Ziff and Stell's Polymerization Models.

Ziff and Stell (Kinetics of polymer gelation, J. Chem. Phys., 73 (1980), 3492-3499.) pioneered the study of kinetic models of polymer growth and gelation which involve differential equations that describe the temporal evolution of oligomer concentrations and in which gelation is manifest as a finite-time singularity. Here we present a systematic framework for studying post-gelation behavior of these and related models that allows inclusion of the effects of diffusion and other transport mechanisms as well as those of sources and sinks, and which enables determination of, among other things, the final structure of the gel under a variety of conditions.