Related papers: Nonlinear mechanics of triblock copolymer elastome…
A statistical mechanical distance constraint model (DCM) is presented that explicitly accounts for network rigidity among constraints present within a system. Constraints are characterized by local microscopic free energy functions.…
The elastic network (EN) is a prime model that describes the long-time dynamics of biomolecules. However, the use of harmonic potentials renders this model insufficient for studying large conformational changes of proteins (e.g. stretching…
Crystal plasticity theory is often employed to predict the mesoscopic states of polycrystalline metals, and is well-known to be costly to simulate. Using a neural network with convolutional layers encoding correlations in time and space, we…
Using coarse-grained molecular-dynamics simulations, a generic styrene-(block)-butadiene-(block)-styrene (SBS) triblock copolymer under lamellar conformation is used in order to investigate the mutual entanglement evolution when a structure…
Semiflexible polymers such as filamentous actin play a vital role in the mechanical behavior of cells, yet the basic properties of cross-linked F-actin networks remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we have performed numerical…
This paper presents the derivation of the homogenized equations that describe the macroscopic mechanical response of elastomers filled with liquid inclusions in the setting of small quasistatic deformations. The derivation is carried out…
A polymer-chain network is a collection of interconnected polymer-chains, made themselves of the repetition of a single pattern called a monomer. Our first main result establishes that, for a class of models for polymer-chain networks, the…
We report the mechanical response of a model nanocomposite system of poly(styrene) (PS)-silica to large-amplitude oscillatory shear deformations. Nonlinear behavior of PS nanocomposites is discussed with the changes in particle dispersion…
An assumption in micromechanical analysis of polymers is that the constitutive polymeric media is non-porous. Non-porosity of media, however, is merely a simplifying assumption. In this paper, we neglect this assumption and studied polymer…
Cross-linked polymer networks with orientational order constitute a wide class of soft materials and are relevant to biological systems (e.g., F-actin bundles). We analytically study the nonlinear force-extension relation of an array of…
We study the influence of some quenched disorder in the sequence of monomers on the entropic elasticity of long polymeric chains. Starting from the Kratky-Porod model, we show numerically that some randomness in the favoured angles between…
Here, the general design and properties of new multiple network elastomers with an exceptional combination of stiffness, toughness, and elasticity are reported. In this paper, it is reported in more detail how the increase in strain at…
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,…
We perform equilibrium Langevin dynamics simulations to understand the structure-viscoelasticity relationship of a dually crosslinked reversible polymer network. The cross-linking is achieved by introducing orthogonal crosslinkers (A and B)…
We propose a physical model for the nonlinear inelastic mechanics of sticky biopolymer networks with potential applications to inelastic cell mechanics. It consists in a minimal extension of the glassy wormlike chain (GWLC) model, which has…
The effect of network chain distribution on the mechanical behavior of elastomers is one of the long-standing problems in rubber mechanics. The classical theory of rubber elasticity is built upon the assumption of entropic elasticity of…
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…
Experiments have long shown that a polymer network of covalent bonds commonly ruptures at a stress that is orders of magnitude lower than the strength of the covalent bonds. Here we investigate this large reduction in strength by…
Computer simulations can aid in understanding how collective materials properties emerge from interactions between simple constituents. Here, we introduce a coarse-grained model that enables simulation of networks of actin filaments, myosin…
Simulations are used to examine the microscopic origins of strain hardening in polymer glasses. While stress-strain curves for a wide range of temperature can be fit to the functional form predicted by entropic network models, many other…