Related papers: Rethinking the Transient Network Concept in Entang…
A long standing puzzle in the rheology of living cells is the origin of the experimentally observed long time stress relaxation. The mechanics of the cell is largely dictated by the cytoskeleton, which is a biopolymer network consisting of…
The interplay of topological constraints, excluded volume interactions, persistence length and dynamical entanglement length in solutions and melts of linear chains and ring polymers is investigated by means of kinetic Monte Carlo…
We introduce an entropic network model for copolymer elastomers based on the evolution of microscopic chain conformations during deformation. We show that the stress results from additive contributions due to chain stretch at the global as…
Extensive molecular simulations are applied to characterize the equilibrium dynamics, entanglement topology, and nonlinear extensional rheology of symmetric ring-linear polymer blends with systematically varied ring fraction $\phi_R$.…
Polydispersity is inevitable in industrially produced polymers. Established theories of polymer dynamics and rheology, however, were mostly built on monodisperse linear polymers. Dynamics of polydisperse polymers is yet to be fully explored…
Ring polymers remain a major challenge to our current understanding of polymer dynamics. Experimental results are difficult to interpret because of the uncertainty in the purity and dispersity of the sample. Using both equilibrium and…
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,…
This study presents a Eulerian theory to elucidate the molecular kinematics in polymer networks and their connection to continuum deformation, grounded in fundamental statistical physics and thermodynamics. Three key innovations are…
Solutions of polymer chains are modelled using non-equilibrium Brownian dynamics simulations, with physically associative beads which form reversible crosslinks to establish a system-spanning physical gel network. Rheological properties…
The viscous flow of polymer chains in dense melts is dominated by topological constraints whenever the single chain contour length, N, becomes larger than the characteristic scale Ne, defining comprehensively the macroscopic rheological…
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…
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…
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…
In this paper, a micro-mechanical model is introduce to characterize the stress softening phenomenon in double network hydrogels. Damage in polymer matrices under deformation, which appears as the rupture of cross-linking, is assumed to…
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…
Constitutive equations are derived for the time-dependent behavior of particle-reinforced elastomers at isothermal loading with finite strains. A rubbery polymer is modelled as a network of macromolecules bridged by junctions which can slip…
We simulate entangled linear polymers in free-standing thin film geometries where the confining dimension is on the same scale or smaller than the bulk chain dimensions. We compare both film-averaged and layer-resolved, spatially…
The elasticity of rubbery polymer networks has been considered to be entropy-driven. On the other hand, studies on single polymer chain mechanics have revealed that the elasticity of ultimately stretched polymer chains is dominated by the…
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…
We present an extensive analysis of the relaxation dynamics of entangled linear polymer melts via long-time molecular dynamics simulations of a generic bead-spring model. We study the mean-squared displacements, the autocorrelation function…