Related papers: Mechanics of polymer brush based soft active mater…
In this paper, we study the equilibrium properties of polymer chains end-tethered to a fluid membrane. The loss of conformational entropy of the polymer results in an inhomogeneous pressure field that we calculate for gaussian chains. We…
We study the Brownian dynamics of flexible and semiflexible polymer chains densely grafted on a flat substrate, upon rapid quenching of the system when the quality of solvent becomes poor and chains attempt collapse into a globular state.…
There is ample evidence that polymer brushes reduce friction between surfaces. Several industrial applications take advantage of this fact, such as those in plastic bag production, where the brushes act as slip agents; however, the complex…
Via computer simulations, we demonstrate how a densely grafted layer of polymers, a {\it brush}, could be turned into an efficient switch through chemical modification of some of its end-monomers. In this way, a surface coating with…
We study the friction between a flat solid surface where polymer chains have been end-grafted and a cross-linked elastomer at low sliding velocity. The contribution of isolated grafted chains' penetration in the sliding elastomer has been…
Polymer brush layers are responsive materials that swell in contact with good solvents and their vapors. We deposit drops of an almost completely wetting volatile oil onto an oleophilic polymer brush layer and follow the response of the…
We present the first analytic theory with elegant and closed-form analytical solutions to explore the cosolvency effect in polymer brushes, where polymer chains that are poorly soluble in two pure solvents become fully soluble in certain…
Planar brushes formed by end-grafted semiflexible polyampholyte chains, each chain containing equal number of positively and negatively charged monomers is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. Keeping the length of the chains…
Friction between ring-polymer brushes at melt densities sliding past each other are studied using extensive course-grained molecular dynamics simulations and scaling arguments, and the results are compared to the friction between…
The structural features of polystyrene brushes grafted on spherical silica nanoparticles immersed in polystyrene are investigated by means of a Monte Carlo methodology based on polymer mean field theory. The nanoparticle radii (either 8 nm…
Using surface-tension measurements, we study the brush-limited adsorption dynamics of a range of amphiphilic polymers, PAAH-$\alpha$-$\textrm{C}_n$ composed of a poly(acrylic acid) backbone, PAAH, grafted with a fraction $\alpha$ of alkyl…
It has recently been proposed that the miscibility of nanoparticles with a polymer matrix can be controlled by grafting polymer chains to the nanoparticle surface. As a first step to study this situation, we have used molecular dynamics…
We study the influence of chain stiffness on droplet flow in a nano-channel, coated with semiflexible hydrophobic polymers by means of non-equilibrium molecular-dynamics simulations. The studied system is then a moving droplet in the slit…
We investigate the effect of mobile polymer brushes on proteins embedded in biological membranes by employing both Asakura-Oosawa type of theoretical model and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. The brush polymer-induced…
We report a simulation study for bottle-brush polymers grafted on a rigid backbone. Using a standard coarse-grained bead-spring model extensive molecular dynamics simulations for such macromolecules under good solvent conditions are…
Planar brushes of flexible, semiflexible and rodlike diblock polyampholytes are studied using molecular dynamics simulations and scaling analysis in a wide range of the grafting density. Simulations show linear dependence of the average…
Understanding the dynamics of drops on polymer-coated surfaces is crucial for optimizing applications such as self-cleaning materials or microfluidic devices. While the static and dynamic properties of deposited drops have been well…
We study the friction of a poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) rubber network sliding, at low velocity, on a substrate on which PDMS chains are end-tethered. We thus clearly evidence the contribution to friction of the pull-out mechanism of…
Soft polymers are ubiquitous materials in nature and as engineering materials with properties varying from rate-independent to rate-dependent. Current fracture toughness measures are non-unique for rate-dependent soft materials for varying…
The elastic response is studied of a single flexible chain grafted on a rigid plane and an ensemble of non-interacting tethered chains. It is demonstrated that the entropic theory of rubber elasticity leads to conclusions that disagree with…