Related papers: Viscoelasticity and primitive path analysis of ent…
The effective quasistatic conductivity of composite polymeric electrolytes is studied in terms of a hard-core--penetrable-layer model. Used to incorporate the interface phenomena (such as amorphization of the polymer matrix around filler…
We propose a model to analyze the insurgence of pull-in and wrinkling failures in electroactive thin films. We take in consideration both cases of voltage and charge control, and study the role of prestretch and size of activated regions,…
We present atomistic molecular dynamics simulations of two Polyethylene systems where all entanglements are trapped: a perfect network, and a melt with grafted chain ends. We examine microscopically at what level topological constraints can…
The predictions of the polymer mode coupling theory for the finite size corrections to the transport coefficients of entangled polymeric systems are tested in comparisons with various experimental data. It is found that quantitative…
Thin polymer films are widely used as functional and protective coatings. However, determining the composition and processing conditions that produce a desired function is a tedious process due to the large number of factors that must be…
A simple expression for the composition dependence of the Flory-Huggins interaction parameter of polymer/solvent systems reported earlier is used to model the demixing of polymer solutions into two liquid phases. To this end the system…
Two coarse-grained models for polymer chains in dense glass-forming polymer melts are studied by computer simulation: the bond-fluctuation model on a simple cubic lattice, where a bond-length potential favors long bonds, is treated by…
In this paper we study a system of entangled chains that bear reversible cross-links in a melt state. The cross-links are tethered uniformly on the backbone of each chain. A slip-link type model for the system is presented and solved for…
A Flory theory is constructed for a long polymer ring in a melt of unknotted and non-concatenated rings. The theory assumes that the ring forms an effective annealed branched object and computes its primitive path. It is shown that the…
We present a detailed study of the static and dynamic behavior of long semiflexible polymer chains in a melt. Starting from previously obtained fully equilibrated high molecular weight polymer melts [{\it Zhang et al.} ACS Macro Lett. 3,…
In earlier work we provided the first evidence that the collapse, or coil-globule, transition of an isolated polymer in solution can be seen in a four-dimensional model. Here we investigate, via Monte Carlo simulations, the canonical…
We used a coarse-grained model to study the geometric and dynamic properties of flexible entangled polymer chains dissolved in explicit athermal solvents. Our simulations successfully reproduced the geometrical properties including the…
For optimal processing and design of entangled polymeric materials it is important to establish a rigorous link between the detailed molecular composition of the polymer and the viscoelastic properties of the macroscopic melt. We review…
We briefly review the recent advances in the rheology of entangled polymers and identify emerging research trends and outstanding challenges, especially with respect to branched polymers. Emphasis is placed on the role of well-characterized…
We have mapped the physics of polymer melts onto a time-dependent Landau-Ginzburg $|\psi|^4$ field theory using techniques of functional integration. Time in the theory is simply a label for the location of a given monomer along the extent…
Ring polymers remain a major challenge to our current understanding of polymer dynamics. Experimental results are difficult to interpret because of the uncertainty in the purity and dispersity of the sample. Using both equilibrium and…
Significant challenges exist in the nonlinear extensional rheology of entangled polymers. With simulations, we show that the key to understanding this problem is to recognize the existence and importance of a strain-induced crossover from…
We have developed a new technique to measure viscoelasticity in soft materials such as polymer solutions, by monitoring thermal fluctuations of embedded probe particles using laser interferometry in a microscope. Interferometry allows us to…
In 1975 Doi and Edwards predicted that entangled polymer melts and solutions can have a constitutive instability, signified by a decreasing stress for shear rates greater than the inverse of the reptation time. Experiments did not support…
The conformational states of a semiflexible polymer enclosed in a compact domain of typical size $a$ are studied as stochastic realizations of paths defined by the Frenet equations under the assumption that stochastic "curvature" satisfies…