Related papers: Giant barocaloric effects in natural rubber: A rel…
Mechanical metamaterials are artificial composites with tunable advanced mechanical properties. Particularly interesting types of mechanical metamaterials are flexible metamaterials, which harness internal rotations and instabilities to…
Shape memory polymers (SMPs) are materials with a great potential for future use in smart materials and structures. When heated from cold state (below the transformation temperature, which can either be the glass transition temperature or…
Electrocaloric (EC) materials show promise in eco-friendly solid-state refrigeration and integrable on-chip thermal management. While direct measurement of EC thin-films still remains challenging, a generic theoretical framework for…
The immense dependence of the glass transition temperature $T_g$ on molecular weight $M$ is one of the most fundamentally and practically important features of polymer glass formation. Here, we report on molecular dynamics simulation of…
By taking advantage of the molecular weight dependence of the glass transition of polymers and their ability to form perfectly miscible blends, we propose a way to modify the fragility of a system, from fragile to strong, keeping the same…
We develop a theory of the effective disorder temperature in glass-forming materials driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium by external forces. Our basic premise is that the slow configurational degrees of freedom of such materials are…
This research paper comprehensively explores the effects of molecular weight and chain architecture on the interfacial and thermodynamic properties of cyclic and linear polymer blends. Utilizing the Kremer-Grest bead-spring model, the study…
Natural rubber is obtained by processing natural rubber latex, a liquid colloidal suspension that rapidly gels after exudation from the tree. We prepared such gels by acidification, in a large range of particle volume fractions, and…
Vapor deposition of molecules on a substrate often results in glassy materials of high kinetic stability and low enthalpy. The extraordinary properties of such glasses are attributed to high rates of surface diffusion during sample…
The ice-rubber interface is critical in applications such as tires and shoe outsoles, yet its molecular tribology remains unclear. Using all-atom molecular dynamics simulations, we studied premelting layers at the basal face of ice in…
The effects of thermal elastic fluctuations in rubber materials are examined. It is shown that, due to an interplay with the incompressibility constraint, these fluctuations qualitatively modify the large-deformation stress-strain relation,…
The influence of repeated thermal cycling on mechanical properties, structural relaxation, and evolution of the potential energy in binary glasses is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider a binary mixture with…
We propose a solid state refrigeration technique based on repeated adiabatic magnetization/demagnetization cycles of a superconductor which acts as the working substance. The gradual cooling down of a substrate (normal metal) in contact…
We formulate a microscopic, no adjustable parameter, theory of activated relaxation in supercooled liquids directly in terms of the repulsive and attractive forces within the framework of pair correlations. Under isochoric conditions,…
Modelling elastocaloric effect (eCE) is crucial for the design of environmentally friendly and energy-efficient eCE based solid-state cooling devices. Here, a thermodynamically consistent non-isothermal phase-field model (PFM) coupling…
A new model for predicting the effective thermal conductivity of polycrystalline materials is presented. In contrast to existing models, our new model is based on the thin-interface description of grain boundaries (GBs) and treats GBs as an…
This paper examines the effect of cooling on disentanglement forces in polymers and the implications for both single chain pullout and polymer dynamics. I derive the explicit dependence of the distribution of these forces on temperature,…
A Landau theory is constructed for the vulcanization transition in cross-linked polymer systems with spontaneous nematic ordering. The neo-classical theory of the elasticity of nematic elastomers is derived via the minimization of this…
Recent experiments have demonstrated that the glass transition temperature of thin polymer films can be shifted as compared to the same polymer in the bulk, the amplitude and the sign of this effect depending on the interaction between the…
High cooling power of magnetocaloric refrigeration can be achieved only at large amounts of heat, which can be transferred in one cycle from cold end to hot end at quasi-isothermal conditions. The simple experimental method for direct…