Universal description of steric hindrance in flexible polymer gels Quesada Pérez, Manuel Maroto Centeno, José Alberto Ramos Tejada, María del Mar Martín Molina, Alberto The authors are grateful for funding from "Consejeria de Economia, Conocimiento, Empresas y Universidad, Junta de Andalucia, Programa Operativo FEDER Andalucia 2014-2020", Project PY20_00138. In addition, A. M.-M. thanks the financial support by the "Consejeria de Conocimiento, Investigacion y Universidad, Junta de Andalucia" and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), Project SOMM17/6105/UGR. M. M. R.-T. also thanks the financial support by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion, Projects PGC2018-098770-B-I00 and PID2020-116615RA-I00. In this work, the long-time diffusion of a solute in a chemically crosslinked and flexible hydrogel is computed from a bead-spring model of a polymeric network to assess the effect of steric obstruction. The relative diffusivities obtained for a wide variety of systems can be described by an exponential decay depending on a parameter that differs from that employed for rigid gels. The mathematical expression derived here can approximately predict the diffusivity in flexible gels if steric hindrance is the mechanism ruling diffusion. 2021-07-21T07:30:45Z 2021-07-21T07:30:45Z 2021-06-28 journal article Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2021, Advance Article. DOI: [10.1039/d1cp02113c] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/69811 10.1039/d1cp02113c eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/es/ open access Atribución-NoComercial 3.0 España Royal Society of Chemistry