Related papers: Understanding Creep Suppression Mechanism in Polym…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and food grains are ubiquitous in civil engineering, geoscience, agriculture, and medicine. While the influence of friction between the grains on the static structure of these systems is well…
Interfaces are a most common motif in complex systems. To understand how the presence of interfaces affect hydrophobic phenomena, we use molecular simulations and theory to study hydration of solutes at interfaces. The solutes range in size…
The coupled dynamics of entangled polymers which span a broad time and length scales govern the unique viscoelastic properties of polymers. To follow chain mobility by numerical simulations from the intermediate Rouse and reptation regimes…
Monte Carlo computer simulations are used to study the segregation behaviour of two polymers under cylindrical confinement. Using a multiple-histogram method, the conformational free energy, F, of the polymers was measured as a function of…
Polymers are a primary building block in many biomaterials, often interacting with anisotropic backgrounds. While previous studies have considered polymer dynamics within nematic solvents, rarely are the the effects of anisotropic viscosity…
Properties of engineering materials are generally influenced by defects such as point defects (vacancies, interstitials, substitutional defects), line defects (dislocations), planar defects (grain boundaries, free surfaces/nanostructures,…
In this study, we investigate both experimentally and computationally the molecular interactions of two distinct polymers with graphene. Our experimental findings indicate that the use of a polymer mixture reduces the transfer induced…
We perform a systematic application of the hybrid particle-field molecular dynamics technique [Milano et al, J. Chem. Phys. 2009, 130, 214106] to study interfacial properties and potential of mean force (PMF) for separating nanoparticles…
Nano-scale confinement of polymer in cone-shaped geometries occurs in many experimental situations. A flexible polymer confined in a cone-shaped nano-channel is studied theoretically and using molecular dynamics simulations. Distribution of…
The mechanical property enhancement of polymer reinforced with nano-thin clay platelets (of high aspect ratio) is associated with a high polymer-filler interfacial area per unit volume. The ideal case of fully separated (exfoliated)…
The structural features of polystyrene brushes grafted on spherical silica nanoparticles immersed in polystyrene are investigated by means of a Monte Carlo methodology based on polymer mean field theory. The nanoparticle radii (either 8 nm…
Predicting the future behaviour of complex systems exhibiting critical-like dynamics is often considered to be an intrinsically hard task. Here, we study the predictability of the depinning dynamics of elastic interfaces in random media…
Fluids under nanoscale confinement differ -- and often dramatically -- from their bulk counterparts. A notorious feature of nanoconfined fluids is their inhomogeneous density profile along the confining dimension, which plays a key role in…
Nanometrically thin glassy films depart strikingly from the behavior of their bulk counterparts. We investigate whether the dynamical differences between bulk and thin film glasses can be understood by differences in local microscopic…
Membrane wrapping underlies nanoparticle uptake during endocytosis, whereas the reverse process of membrane unwrapping accompanies particle expulsion and membrane fusion events. Existing theoretical descriptions typically focus on adhesion…
Using molecular simulations and theory, we develop an explicit mapping of the contribution of molecular relaxation modes in glassy thermosets to the shear modulus, where the relaxations were tuned by altering the polarity of side groups.…
We employ a three-dimensional molecular dynamics to simulate translocation of a polymer through a nanopore driven by an external force. The translocation is investigated for different three pore diameter and two different external forces.…
Understanding how polymer topology influences melt extrudability is critical for advancing material design in extrusion-based additive manufacturing. In this work, we develop a bottom-up, cross-scale modeling framework that integrates…
Monte Carlo simulations are used to study the behavior of two polymers under confinement in a cylindrical tube. Each polymer is modeled as a chain of hard spheres. We measure the free energy of the system, F, as a function of the distance…
Micelles and vesicles are promising candidates in targeted drug/gene delivery, bioreactors, and templates for nanoparticle synthesis. We investigated the morphology and dynamics of PEG-PDMS-PEG triblock copolymer nano-scale assemblies…