Structural and thermodynamic properties of a freely-jointed Yukawa hard-sphere chain fluid

We continue our long-term study of the application of the product-reactant Ornstein-Zernike approach (PROZA) to polymere-fluid models. The PROZA is a theory that yields monomer-monomer pair correlation functions, from which the thermodynamics of a model fluid of polymer molecules can be obtained. Here we extend our earlier work on hard-sphere chains by adding a van der Waals attraction, modelled by a Yukawa term, to the hard-sphere interaction between monomers. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.