Related papers: Healing of polymer interfaces: Interfacial dynamic…
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…
We have developed a new multiscale simulation technique to investigate history-dependent flow behavior of entangled polymer melt, using a smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation with microscopic simulators that account for the dynamics…
The diffusion of small molecular penetrants through polymeric materials represents an important fundamental problem, relevant to the design of materials for applications such as coatings and membranes. Polymer networks hold promise in these…
We study the structure and interfacial properties of model athermal mixtures of colloids and excluded volume polymers. The colloid particles are modeled as hard spheres whereas the polymer coils are modeled as chains formed from…
The efficiency of soft particles to stabilize emulsions is examined by measuring their desorption free energy, i.e., the mechanical work required to detach the particle from a fluid interface. Here, we consider rubber-like elastic as well…
Recent experiments and simulations have demonstrated that particle-covered interfaces can exist in stable non-spherical shapes as a result of the steric jamming of the interfacially trapped particles, which confers the interface with…
Free surfaces in glassy polymer films are known to induce surface mobile layers with enhanced dynamics. Using molecular dynamics simulations of a bead-spring model, we study a wide variety of layer-resolved structural and dynamical…
Frontal polymerization is a promising energy-saving method for rapid fabrication of polymer components with good mechanical properties. In these systems, a small energy input is sufficient to convert monomers, from a liquid or soft solid…
We present confocal microscopy studies of novel particle-stabilized emulsions. The novelty arises because the immiscible fluids have an accessible upper critical solution temperature. The emulsions have been created by beginning with…
Droplet coalescence is ubiquitous in nature and the same time key to various technologies, such as inkjet printing. Here, we report on the coalescence of polymer droplets with different chain lengths coalescing on substrates of different…
We examine entanglements using monomer contacts between pairs of chains in a Brownian-dynamics simulation of a polymer melt. A map of contact positions with respect to the contacting monomer numbers (i,j) shows clustering in small regions…
In this paper, we employ Molecular Dynamics computer simulations to study and compare the statics and dynamics of linear and circular (ring) polymer chains in entangled solutions of different densities. While we confirm that linear chain…
We use experiments to study the dynamics of the healing of a blister, a localized bump in a thin elastic layer that is adhered to a soft substrate everywhere except at the bump. We create a blister by gently placing a glass cover slip on a…
We present results from extensive molecular dynamics simulations of collapse transitions of hydrophobic polymers in explicit water focused on understanding effects of lengthscale of the hydrophobic surface and of attractive interactions on…
Nanoscale polymeric thin films are widely used in diverse applications such as energy devices, flexible electronics and biosensors, where a satisfactory mechanical performance is of vital importance to realize their full functionality. It…
Diffusion of long ring polymers in a melt is much slower than the reorganization of their internal structures. While direct evidences for entanglements have not been observed in the long ring polymers unlike linear polymer melts, threading…
In this article we discuss in detail the effective approaches to enhance the thermal conductivity in polymer composites. It is shown from numerical simulations that maximizing interfacial area between filler and polymer enhances very…
Vitrimers are a special class of polymers that undergo dynamic cross-linking under thermal stimuli. Their ability to exchange covalent bonds can be harnessed to mitigate damage in a composite or to achieve recyclable aerospace composites.…
Dispersions of immiscible liquids, such as emulsions and polymer blends, are at the core of many industrial applications which makes the understanding of their properties (morphology, stability, etc.) of great interest. A wide range of…
Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…