Related papers: Enhancement of coil-stretch hysteresis by self-con…
Extensional rheometry and Brownian Dynamics simulations of flexible polymer solutions confirm predictions based on blob concepts that coil--stretch hysteresis in extensional flows increases with concentration, reaching a maximum at the…
The coil-stretch transition in extensional flows of viscoelastic dilute polymer solutions is known to be associated with a strong hysteresis in molecular conformations and rheo-optical properties. At infinite dilution, hysteresis is caused…
Polymers in nonuniform flows undergo strong deformation, which in the presence of persistent stretching can result in the coil-stretch transition. This phenomenon has been characterized by using the formalism of nonequilibrium statistical…
By quantitative studies of statistics of polymer stretching in a random flow and of a flow field we demonstrate that the stretching of polymer molecules in a 3D random flow occurs rather sharply via the coil-stretch transition at the value…
While the dynamics of polymer chains in equilibrium media is well understood by now, the polymer dynamics in active non-equilibrium environments can be very different. Here we study the dynamics of polymers in a viscous medium containing…
The cavitation flow of linear-polymer solutions around a cylinder is studied by performing a large-scale molecular dynamics simulation. The addition of polymer chains remarkably suppresses the cavitation. The polymers are stretched into a…
When injected through a contraction, high molecular weight polymer solutions exhibit a sharp increase of apparent viscosity which originates from stretching polymer chains above a critical extension rate. This chain stretching can also…
Constant temperature molecular dynamics simulations were used to study solutions of flexible polyelectrolyte chains at nonzero concentrations with explicit counterions and unscreened coulombic interactions. Counterion condensation, measured…
The dynamic behavior of semi-dilute polymer solutions is governed by an interplay between solvent quality, concentration, molecular weight, and flow type. Semi-dilute solutions are characterized by large fluctuations in concentration,…
The influence of an external flow on the relaxation dynamics of a single polymer is investigated theoretically and numerically. We show that a pronounced dynamical slowdown occurs in the vicinity of the coil-stretch transition, especially…
A polymer in a turbulent flow undergoes the coil-stretch transition when the Weissenberg number, i.e. the product of the Lyapunov exponent of the flow and the relaxation time of the polymer, surpasses a critical value. The effect of…
Polymer bottlebrushes provide intriguing features being relevant both in nature and in synthetic systems. While their presence in the articular cartilage optimizes synovial joint lubrication, bottlebrushes offer pathways for fascinating…
Fluid transport in microfluidic systems typically is laminar due to the low Reynolds number characteristic of the flow. The inclusion of suspended polymers imparts elasticity to fluids, allowing instabilities to be excited when substantial…
Motivated by recent nanofluidics experiments, we use Brownian dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations to study the conformation, organization and dynamics of two polymer chains confined to a single box-like cavity. The polymers are modeled as…
The extension elasticity of rod-coil mutliblock copolymers is analyzed for two experimentally accessible situations. In the quenched case, when the architecture is fixed by the synthesis, the force law is distinguished by a sharp change in…
The conformation of a long linear polymer dissolved in fluid and exposed to an extensional flow is well-known to exhibit a "coil-stretch" transition, which for sufficiently long chains can lead to bistability. The present work reports…
Recent experiments suggest that shear-enhanced growth of concentration fluctuations in polymer solutions is strongly influenced by solid boundaries. We analyze the dynamics of a model of a sheared polymer solution, accounting for the effect…
We analyze the conformational dynamics and statistical properties of an active polymer model. The polymer is described as a freely-jointed bead-rod chain subject to stochastic active force dipoles that act on the suspending solvent where…
Nonlinear extensional flows are common in polymer processing but remain challenging theoretically because dramatic stretching of chains deforms the entanglement network far from equilibrium. Here, we present coarse-grained simulations of…
A new quantitative theory for polyelectrolytes in salt free dilute solutions is developed. Depending on the electrostatic interaction strength, polyelectrolytes in solutions can undergo strong stretching (with polyelectrolyte dimension…