Related papers: Olympic Gels: Concatenation and Swelling
Cytoskeletal gels are prototyped to reproduce the mechanical contraction of the cytoskeleton in-vitro. They are composed of a polymer network (backbone), swollen by the presence of a liquid solvent, and active molecules (molecular motors,…
Colloid-polymer mixtures may undergo either fluid-fluid phase separation or gelation. This depends on the depth of the quench (polymer concentration) and polymer-colloid size ratio. We present a real-space study of dynamics in phase…
The state space of a polymer molecule is analysed. We show how the size of the state space can be reduced on the basis of symmetry. In the reduced state space, the probability of a new state (termed below as class) is equal to the number of…
Microgels are soft colloidal particles that, when dispersed in a solvent, swell and deswell in response to changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature, concentration, and $p$H. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we model bulk…
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…
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…
Both entangled and unentangled polymer melts exhibit stress overshoots when subject to shearing flow. The size of the overshoot depends on the applied shear rate and is related to relaxation mechanisms such as reptation, chain stretch and…
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…
We present Monte Carlo simulations of a dense polymer melt which shows glass-transition-like slowing-down upon cooling, as well as a build up of nematic order. At small wave vectors q this model system shows excess scattering similar to…
The patterns arising from the differential swelling of gels are investigated experimentally and theoretically as a model for the differential growth of living tissues. Two geometries are considered: a thin strip of soft gel clamped to a…
Large scale molecular dynamics simulations on graphic processing units (GPUs) are employed to study the scaling behavior of ring polymers with various topological constraints in melts. Typical sizes of rings containing $3_1$, $5_1$ knots…
We present a kinetic model of crystal growth of polymers of finite molecular weight. Experiments help to classify polymer crystallization broadly into two kinetic regimes. One is observed in melts or in high molar mass polymer solutions and…
Nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations are used to study the deformation behavior of disperse polymer melts by tracking test chains of length N = Mw, the weight average molecular weight, in melts of varying dispersity. At high strain…
We visualize entanglements in polymer melts using molecular dynamics simulation. A bead at an entanglement interacts persistently for long times with the non-bonded beads (those excluding the adjacent ones in the same chain). The…
We investigate the static shear viscosity on the sol side of the vulcanization transition within a minimal mesoscopic model for the Rouse-dynamics of a randomly crosslinked melt of phantom polymers. We derive an exact relation between the…
We present results of molecular dynamics simulations of very long model polymer chains analyzed by various experimentally relevant techniques. The segment motion of the chains is found to be in very good agreement with the repatation model.…
Equilibration of polymer melts containing highly entangled long polymer chains in confinement or with free surfaces is a challenge for computer simulations. We approach this problem by first studying polymer melts based on the soft-sphere…
We investigate the crystallization of crosslinked and entangled polymers under external deformation using a coarse-grained poly(vinyl alcohol) (CG-PVA) model and molecular dynamics simulations. Following uniaxial deformation, the systems…
The conformational complexity of linear polymers far exceeds that of point-like atoms and molecules. Polymers can bend, twist, even become knotted. Thus they may also display a much richer phase structure than point particles. But it is not…
The osmotic pressure $P$ in equilibrium polymers (EP) in good solvent is investigated by means of a three dimensional off-lattice Monte Carlo simulation. Our results compare well with real space renormalisation group theory and the osmotic…