Related papers: Olympic Gels: Concatenation and Swelling
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…
We report a kinetic Monte Carlo modeling study of nanocrystal layer sintering. Features that are of interest for the dynamics of the layer as a whole, especially the morphology of the evolving structure, are considered. It is found that the…
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…
Based upon kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of crystallization in a simple polymer model we present a new picture of the mechanism by which the thickness of lamellar polymer crystals is constrained to a value close to the minimum…
The gel point of end-linked model networks is determined from computer simulation data. It is shown that the difference between the true gel point conversion, $p_{\text{c}}$, and the ideal mean field prediction for the gel point,…
Small angle neutron and x-ray scattering methods are used to investigate the structure of dilute suspensions of two different ferrofluid systems dispersed in soft polyacrylamide hydrogels. It is found that the particles in the fluid are…
We report the results of extensive Dynamic Monte Carlo simulations of systems of self-assembled Equilibrium Polymers without rings in good solvent. Confirming recent theoretical predictions, the mean-chain length is found to scale as $\Lav…
The transport coefficients of dense polymeric fluids are approximately calculated from the microscopic intermolecular forces. The following finite molecular weight effects are discussed within the Polymer-Mode-Coupling theory (PMC) and…
We derive a multiphysics model that accounts for network elasticity with spontaneous strains, swelling and nematic interactions in liquid crystal gels (LCGs). We discuss the coupling among the various physical mechanisms, with particular…
The water flow through the poly(acrylamide) gel under a constant water pressure is measured by newly designed apparatus. The time evolution of the water flow in the gel, is calculated based on the collective diffusion model of the polymer…
We analyse the dynamics of different routes to collapse of a constrained polyelectrolyte gel in contact with an ionic bath. The evolution of the gel is described by a model that incorporates non-linear elasticity, Stefan-Maxwell diffusion…
Obstructions influence the growth and expansion of bodies in a wide range of settings -- but isolating and understanding their impact can be difficult in complex environments. Here, we study obstructed growth/expansion in a model system…
Swelling is a volumetric-growth process in which a porous material expands by spontaneous imbibition of additional pore fluid. Swelling is distinct from other growth processes in that it is inherently poromechanical: Local expansion of the…
Nanometer-thick supported lms of polymer melts spontaneously form and spread around sessile droplets that are deposited on oxidized silicon wafers. At steady state, the lms become dense and adopt a uniform thickness which is equal to twice…
We use non-equilibrium atomistic molecular dynamics simulations of unentangled melts of linear and star polymers ($\mathrm{C_{25}H_{52}}$) to study the steady-state viscoelastic response under confinement within nanoscale hematite $\left (…
Ring, or cyclic, polymers have unique properties compared to linear polymers, due to their topologically closed structure that has no beginning or end. Experimental measurements on molecular ring polymers are challenging due to their…
By means of Langevin dynamics simulations, we investigate the gel formation of randomly functionalized polymers in solution, with the ability to form both intra- and intermolecular reversible bonds. Under highly dilute conditions, these…
Unconcatenated, unknotted polymer rings in the melt are subject to strong interactions with neighboring chains due to the presence of topological constraints. We study this by computer simulation using the bond-fluctuation algorithm for…
Liquid mixtures composed of colloidal particles and much smaller non-adsorbing linear homopolymers can undergo a gelation transition due to polymer-mediated depletion forces. We now show that the addition of linear polymers to suspensions…
Polyethylene (PE) chains, with CH2 groups replaced by CBr2 at regular intervals ("precision PE"), have been observed to exhibit competing polymorphs driven by a preference for quantized fold lengths by Tasaki et al. Motivated by this recent…