Related papers: Simulation of Entangled Polymer Solutions
We present a new reduced-order computational method for the molecular dynamics simulation of entangled polymer systems. The polymer chains are modeled as continuous Gaussian chains. Our algorithm is based on the application of the molecular…
The tube model is a central concept in polymer physics, and allows to reduce the complex many-filament problem of an entangled polymer solution to a single filament description. We investigate the probability distribution function of…
Equilibration of polymer melts containing highly entangled long polymer chains in confinement or with free surfaces is a challenge for computer simulations. We approach this problem by first studying polymer melts based on the soft-sphere…
We map dilute or semi-dilute solutions of non-intersecting polymer chains onto a fluid of ``soft'' particles interacting via a concentration dependent effective pair potential, by inverting the pair distribution function of the centers of…
The widely used double-bridging hybrid (DBH) method for equilibrating simulated entangled polymer melts [R. Auhl et al., J. Chem. Phys. v. 119, p. 12718, 2003] loses its effectiveness as chain stiffness increases into the semiflexible…
We present a coarse-grained model for linear polymers with a tunable number of effective atoms (blobs) per chain interacting by intra- and inter-molecular potentials obtained at zero density. We show how this model is able to accurately…
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 present a hybrid Brownian dynamics / Monte Carlo algorithm for simulating solutions of highly entangled semiflexible polymers or filaments. The algorithm combines a Brownian dynamics time-stepping approach with an efficient scheme for…
Several methods for preparing well equilibrated melts of long chains polymers are studied. We show that the standard method in which one starts with an ensemble of chains with the correct end-to-end distance arranged randomly in the…
Although the behavior of entangled polymers in startup shear flows with constant shear rates has been thoroughly investigated, the response under creep has not been frequently considered. In this study, primitive chain network simulations,…
Reptation theory has been highly successful in explaining the unusual material properties of entangled polymer solutions. It reduces the complex many-body dynamics to a single-polymer description where each polymer is envisaged to be…
It has been established that the entangled polymer dynamics can be reasonably described by single chain models such as tube and slip-link models. Although the entanglement effect is a result of the hard-core interaction between chains,…
We visualize entanglements in polymer melts using molecular dynamics simulation. A bead at an entanglement interacts persistently for long times with the non-bonded beads (those excluding the adjacent ones in the same chain). The…
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…
This review describes the development and applications of multi-chain coarse-grained simulations for entangled polymer dynamics. The mean-field tube model has long served as the standard paradigm for describing the many-body entanglement…
Entangled networks of stiff biopolymers exhibit complex dynamic response, emerging from the topological constraints that neighboring filaments impose upon each other. We propose a class of reference models for entanglement dynamics of stiff…
We discuss in detail a recently proposed hybrid particle-continuum scheme for complex fluids and evaluate it at the example of a confined homopolymer solution in slit geometry. The hybrid scheme treats polymer chains near the impenetrable…
We discuss simulations of a simple model for polymer blends in the framework of the Rouse model. At odds with standard predictions, large dynamic asymmetry between the two components induces strong non-exponentiality of the Rouse modes for…
A coarse-grained multi-blob description of polymer solutions is presented, based on soft, transferable effective interactions between bonded and non-bonded blobs. The number of blobs is chosen such that the blob density does not exceed…
Molecular dynamics simulations were performed for a polymer melt. In quiescent states, the inter-chain interaction energy supported by each particle takes relatively large values persistently for long times if the particle is close to an…