We have investigated the electric conductivity, dielectric relaxation behavior, and viscosity for the aqueous solution of cyanobacterial megamolecules, molecular weight $=1.6\times {10}^7$ g/mol, named sacran. Sacran is an anionic polyelectrolyte which has carboxylate and sulfate groups on the saccharide chain. The electric conductivity and the zero shear viscosity demonstrated three crossover concentrations at 0.004, 0.02, and 0.1 wt$\%$. The viscosity was found to be scaled as ∼$c^{1.5}$, ∼$c^{0.5}$, ∼$c^{1.5}$, and ∼$c^{3.0}$ with increasing the sacran concentration. At 0.1 wt$\%$, the sacran chain formed a weak gel which exhibits macroscopic liquid crystal domains including Schlieren texture. Therefore, these crossover concentrations are considered to be the overlap concentration, entanglement concentration, and gelation concentration (or critical polyelectrolyte concentration), respectively. Dielectric relaxation analysis exhibited the fact that sacran has two types of counterions with different counterion-polyion interaction, i.e., strongly bound and loosely bound counterions. The dielectric parameters such as relaxation time or relaxation strength are sensitive to both the entanglement concentration and the gelation concentration, but not the overlap concentration. The number density of bound counterions calculated from the relaxation strength revealed that the counterion is condensed on the sacran chain with raising the sacran concentrations. The decrease in the charge density of the sacran chain reduces the repulsive force between the chains and this would cause the helix transformation or gelation behavior. The chain conformation of sacran in pure water and the gelation mechanism are discussed in relation with the behavior of polyelectrolytes and liquid crystals.

• Received 24 January 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.87.042607