Related papers: Modeling semiflexible polymer networks
As a granular material is compressed, the particles and forces within the system arrange to form complex heterogeneous structures. Force chains are a prime example and are thought to constrain bulk properties such as mechanical stability…
Based on the wormlike chain model, a coarse-grained description of the nonlinear dynamics of a weakly bending semiflexible polymer is developed. By means of a multiple scale perturbation analysis, a length-scale separation inherent to the…
Blends of polymers of different topologies, such as ring and supercoiled, naturally occur in biology and often exhibit emergent viscoelastic properties coveted in industry. However, due to their complexity, along with the difficulty of…
Continuum elasticity is a powerful tool applicable in a broad range of physical systems and phenomena. Yet, understanding how and on what scales material disorder may lead to the breakdown of continuum elasticity is not fully understood. We…
In this thesis the formation and properties of a polymer gel on and at a surface are investigated. The gel under investigation is defined as a three-dimensional network of "phantom" macromolecules that form permanent links with one another…
We consider a general discrete model for heterogeneous semiflexible polymer chains. Both the thermal noise and the inhomogeneous character of the chain (the disorder) are modeled in terms of random rotations. We focus on the quenched…
For decades, complex networks, such as social networks, biological networks, chemical networks, technological networks, have been used to study the evolution and dynamics of different kinds of complex systems. These complex systems can be…
The recent discovery of electro-active polymers has shown great promises in the field of soft robotics, and was logically followed by experimental, numerical and theoretical developments. Most of these studies were concerned with systems…
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,…
Brownian motion and viscoelasticity of semiflexible polymers is a subject that has been studied for many years. Still, rigorous analysis has been hindered due to the difficulty in handling the constraint that polymer chains cannot be…
We performed molecular dynamics simulations to study equilibrium and flow properties of a liquid in a nano-channel with confining surfaces coated with a layer of grafted semiflexible polymers. The coverage spans a wide range of grafting…
We explore the effect of an attractive interaction between parallel-aligned polymers, which are perpendicularly grafted on a substrate. Such an attractive interaction could be due to, e.g., reversible cross-links. The competition between…
We explore the elastic behavior of a wormlike chain under compression in terms of exact solutions for the associated probability densities. Strikingly, the probability density for the end-to-end distance projected along the applied force…
Highly stretchable and self-healable supramolecular elastomers are promising materials for future soft electronics, biomimetic systems, and smart textiles, due to their dynamic cross-linking bonds. The dynamic or reversible nature of the…
We consider a model of an extensible semiflexible filament moving in two dimensions on a motility assay of motor proteins represented explicitly as active harmonic linkers. Their heads bind stochastically to polymer segments within a…
Biopolymer gels such as fibrin and collagen networks are known to develop tensile axial stress when subject to torsion. This negative normal stress is opposite to the classical Poynting effect observed for most elastic solids including…
We study the structure and dynamics of a transient network composed of droplets of microemulsion connected by telechelic polymers. The polymer induces a bridging attraction between droplets without changing their shape. A viscoelastic…
Previous research on semiflexible polymers including cytoskeletal networks in cells has suggested the existence of distinct regimes of elastic response, in which the strain field is either uniform (affine) or non-uniform (non-affine) under…
Disordered filamentous networks with compliant crosslinks exhibit a low linear elastic shear modulus at small strains, but stiffen dramatically at high strains. Experiments have shown that the elastic modulus can increase by up to three…
To understand the dynamical and conformational properties of deformable active agents in porous media, we computationally investigate the dynamics of linear chains and rings made of active Brownian monomers. In porous media, flexible linear…