Related papers: Effect of different monomer precursors with identi…
Polymer chains decorated with a fraction of monomers capable of forming reversible bonds form transient polymer networks that are important in soft and biological systems. If chains are flexible and the attractive monomers are all of the…
We investigate the network topologies of an ensemble of telechelic polymers. The telechelic polymers serve as links between nodes, which consist of aggregates of their telechelic endgroups. Our analysis shows that the degree distribution is…
Vitrimers are polymer networks that, thanks to covalent bond exchange, combine desirable properties of thermoplastic and thermosets, such as flowability and insolubility. For this reason, vitrimers are considered to be good candidates for a…
Fragility is an empirical property that describes how abruptly a glass-forming material solidifies upon supercooling. The degree of fragility carries important implications for the functionality and processability of a material, as well as…
Chemical structure has been long recognized to greatly influence polymer glass formation, but a general molecular theory that predicts how chemical structure determines the properties of glass-forming polymers has been slow to develop.…
Vitrimers, an important subset of dynamically crosslinked polymer networks, have many technological applications for their excellent properties, and the ability to be re-processed through plastic flow above the so-called vitrification…
Polymerization and formation of crosslinked polymer networks are important processes in manufacturing, materials fabrication, and in the case of hydrated polymer networks, synthesis of biomedical materials, drug delivery, and tissue…
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…
Machine learning offers promising tools to develop surrogate models for polymer structure-property relations. Surrogate models can be built upon existing polymer data and are useful for rapidly predicting the properties of unknown polymers.…
Above a critical concentration a wide variety of peptides and proteins self-assemble into amyloid fibrils which entangle to form percolating networks called hydrogels. Such hydrogels have important applications as biomaterials and in…
Simple statistical agglomeration models can provide a universal link between the local structure and the glass transition temperature in network glasses. We first stress the physical features of the models and the hypothesis made, and then…
Molecular dynamics simulations have been employed to study the formation of a physical (thermoreversible) gel by amphiphilic A-B-A triblock copolymers in aqueous solution. In order to mimic the structure of hydrogel-forming polypeptides…
The ability of a feed-forward neural network to learn and classify different states of polymer configurations is systematically explored. Performing numerical experiments, we find that a simple network model can, after adequate training,…
Traditional plastics demand a choice between durability (thermosets) and reprocessability (thermoplastics). Vitrimers are a recent class of polymer network combining both these qualities. Their increased cost of production can be offset by…
Biological molecules can form hydrogen bonds between nearby residues, leading to helical secondary structures. The associated reduction of configurational entropy leads to a temperature dependence of this effect: the "helix-coil…
The swelling dynamics of polymer gels are characterized by the (collective) diffusion coefficient $D$ of the polymer network. Here, we measure the temperature dependence of $D$ of polymer gels with controlled homogeneous network structures…
The thermosensitive behavior of microgel particles suspended in solvents, i.e. their temperature-dependent swelling properties, has triggered ongoing interest in industry and academia over the past forty years. The most-studied polymer is…
Many glass-forming fluids exhibit a remarkable thermodynamic scaling in which dynamic properties, such as the viscosity, the relaxation time, and the diffusion constant, can be described under different thermodynamic conditions in terms of…
This paper reviews recent Monte Carlo simulation studies of the glassy behavior in thin polymer films. The simulations employ a version of the bond-fluctuation lattice model, in which the glass transition is driven by the competition…
Polymers are diverse and versatile materials that have met a wide range of material application demands. They come in several flavors and architectures, e.g., homopolymers, copolymers, polymer blends, and polymers with additives. Searching…