Related papers: Strain Hardening of Polymer Glasses: Entanglements…
Polymer-related materials exhibit rich glassy behaviors at different length scales due to their various molecular structures and topological constraints. Recent studies have identified transient interpenetration of the long-chain rings…
This study investigated, experimentally and numerically, the fracturing behavior of thermoset polymer structures featuring cracks and sharp u-notches. It is shown that, even for cases in which the sharpness of the notch would suggest…
There is a long standing technological problem in which a stress dwell during cyclic loading at room temperature in Ti causes a significant fatigue life reduction. It is thought that localised time dependent plasticity in soft grains…
Reversible crosslinking is a design paradigm for polymeric materials, wherein they are microscopically reinforced with chemical species that form transient crosslinks between the polymer chains. Besides the potential for self-healing,…
The question of whether glass continues to relax at low temperature is of fundamental and practical interest. Here, we report a novel atomistic simulation method allowing us to directly access the long-term dynamics of glass relaxation at…
Packings of macroscopic granular chains capture some of the essential aspects of molecular polymer systems and have been suggested as a paradigm to understand the physics on a molecular scale. However, here we demonstrate that the…
The effect of tensile stress applied during cooling of binary glasses on the potential energy states and mechanical properties is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We study the three-dimensional binary mixture that was…
Actuation of thin polymeric films via electron irradiation is a promising avenue to realize devices based on strain engineered two dimensional (2D) materials. Complex strain profiles demand a deep understanding of the mechanics of the…
A large variety of materials, widely encountered both in engineering applications and in the biological realm, are characterised by a non-vanishing internal stress distribution, even in the absence of external deformations or applied…
A simple and predictive model is put forward explaining the experimentally observed substantial shift of the glass transition temperature, Tg, of sufficiently thin polymer films. It focuses on the limit of small molecular weight, where…
In the context of infinitesimal strain plasticity with hardening, we derive a stochastic homogenization result. We assume that the coefficients of the equation are random functions: elasticity tensor, hardening parameter and flow-rule…
The two approaches to analyzing the large strain behavior of rubbery networks are phenomenologically, using strain energy functions drawn from continuum mechanics, and molecular models, which apply statistical mechanics to compute the…
The lattice cluster theory (LCT) for semiflexible linear telechelic melts, developed in paper I, is applied to examine the influence of chain stiffness on the average degree of self-assembly and the basic thermodynamic properties of linear…
Glasses derive their functional properties from complex relaxation dynamics that remain enigmatic under extreme conditions. While the temperature dependence of these relaxation processes is well-established, their behavior under…
Usually, the strain-induced softening behaviour observed in the differential modulus $K(T,\gamma)$ of hydrogels has been attributed to the breakage of internal structures of the network, such as the cross-links that bind together the…
The stretching of a polymer chain by a large scale chaotic flow is considered. The steady state which emerges as a balance of the turbulent stretching and anharmonic resistance of the chain is quantitatively described, i.e. the dependency…
Constitutive equations are derived for the viscoelastoplastic response of amorphous glassy polymers at isothermal loading with small strains. A polymer is treated as an ensemble of cooperatively relaxing regions (CRR) which rearrange at…
Brush-like structures emerge from stretching of long polymer chains, densely grafted on to the surface of an impermeable substrate. They arise due to the competition between conformational entropic elasticity of polymer chains and excluded…
Constitutive equations are derived for enthalpy recovery in polymeric glasses after thermal jumps. The model is based on the theory of cooperative relaxation in a version of the trapping concept. It is demonstrated that some critical…
It is common to study polymer physics through the use of idealized single-chain models, and the most popular of these is the freely jointed chain model. In certain thermodynamic ensembles, statistical mechanical treatment of this model is…