Related papers: Gelation impairs small molecule migration in polym…
The diffusion of molecules (penetrants) of variable size, shape, and chemistry through dense crosslinked polymer networks is a fundamental scientific problem that is broadly relevant in materials, polymer, physical and biological chemistry.…
We investigate with numerical simulations the molecular origin of viscosity in melts of flexible and semiflexible oligomer rings in comparison to corresponding systems with linear chains. The strong increase of viscosity with ring stiffness…
We investigated the viscoelastic properties of colloid-polymer mixtures at intermediate colloid volume fraction and varying polymer concentrations, thereby tuning the attractive interactions. Within the examined range of polymer…
We investigate the influence of confinement on the positional order of a quasi-1D electron system trapped on the surface of liquid helium. We find evidence that the melting of the Wigner solid (WS) depends on the confinement strength, as…
A number of novel experimental and theoretical results have recently been obtained on active soft matter, demonstrating the various interesting universal and anomalous features of this kind of driven systems. Here we consider a fundamental…
Soft membranes are commonly employed in shape-morphing applications, where the material is programmed to achieve a target shape upon activation by an external trigger, and as coating layers that alter the surface characteristics of bulk…
The structural arrest of a polymeric suspension might be driven by an increase of the cross--linker concentration, that drives the gel transition, as well as by an increase of the polymer density, that induces a glass transition. These…
Solute segregation at grain boundaries (GBs) of polycrystals strongly impacts the mechanical properties of metals including strength, fracture, embrittlement, and corrosion. However, the complexity of GB structures and the large chemical…
It is well-recognized that granular media under rapid flow conditions can be modeled as a gas of hard spheres with inelastic collisions. At moderate densities, a fundamental basis for the determination of the granular hydrodynamics is…
We propose and analyze a mathematical model of the mechanics of gels, consisting of the laws of balance of mass and linear momentum. We consider a gel to be an immiscible and incompressible mixture of a nonlinearly elastic polymer and a…
In this paper, a partial integro-differential equation modeling of coagulation and multiple fragmentation events is studied. Our purpose is to investigate the global existence of gelling weak solutions to the continuous coagulation and…
In dense flowing bidisperse particle mixtures varying in size or density alone, smaller particles sink (driven by percolation) and lighter particles rise (driven by buoyancy). But when the particle species differ from each other in both…
We probe the mechanisms at work in the build-up of thermoreversible gel networks, with the help of hybrid gelatin gels containing a controlled density of irreversible, covalent crosslinks (CL), which we quench below the physical gelation…
The flow behaviors of polymer melt composed of short chains with ten beads between parallel plates are simulated by using a hybrid method of molecular dynamics and computational fluid dynamics. Three problems are solved: creep motion under…
A simple phenomenological model of a binary granular mixture is developed and investigated numerically. We attempt to model the experimental system of [1,2] where a horizontally vibrated binary monolayer was found to exhibit a transition…
We report a computer simulation study of a model gel-former obtained by modifying the three-body interactions of the Stillinger-Weber potential for silicon. This modification reduces the average coordination number and consequently shifts…
Mg grain boundary (GB) segregation and GB diffusion can impact the processing and properties of Al-Mg alloys. Yet, Mg GB diffusion in Al has not been measured experimentally or predicted by simulations. We apply atomistic computer…
We study a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to investigate its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…
We study the effect of a gradient of solvent quality on the coil-globule transition for a polymer in a narrow pore. A simple self-attracting self-avoiding walk model of a polymer in solution shows that the variation in the strength of…
Soft solids and their surface deformations control the response of many natural and artificial systems. Yet, their underlying properties are vigorously debated, particularly for polymer networks. While molecular-scale theories predict no…