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Constitutive equations are derived for the viscoelastic response of rubbery polymers at finite strains. A polymer is thought of as a network of long chains connected to temporary junctions. At a random time, a chain detaches from a…
A theoretical and numerically study of dynamical properties in the sol-gel transition is presented. In particular, the complex phenomenology observed experimentally and numerically in gelling systems is reproduced in the framework of…
Usually, the strain-induced softening behaviour observed in the differential modulus $K(T,\gamma)$ of hydrogels has been attributed to the breakage of internal structures of the network, such as the cross-links that bind together the…
Anisotropic shear relaxation is an interesting but rarely discussed issue in polymer dynamics under confinement [Abberton et al., Macromolecules, 48, 7631, 2015]. According to the earlier study of bead spring simulations for an unentangled…
The mechanics of single-chain stretching and rupture are central to understanding the resilience of biological polymers and designing strong and tough soft materials such as double-network gels and multi-network elastomers. In this work, we…
Reptation theory has been highly successful in explaining the unusual material properties of entangled polymer solutions. It reduces the complex many-body dynamics to a single-polymer description where each polymer is envisaged to be…
We investigate the static and dynamic properties of dendrimers diffusing through a network of linear associative polymers using coarse-grained Brownian dynamics simulations. Both dendrimers and network chains are modelled as bead-spring…
Cells regulate gene expression in part by forming DNA-protein condensates in the nucleus. While existing theories describe the equilibrium size and stability of such condensates, their dynamics remain less understood. Here, we use…
We perform simulations to compute the effective potential between the centers-of-mass of two polymers with reversible bonds. We investigate the influence of the topology of the unbonded precursor (linear or ring) and the specific sequence…
We study the enzymatic degradation of an elastic fiber under tension using an an isotropic random-walk model, coupled with binding-unbinding reactions that weaken the fiber. The fiber is represented by a chain of elastic springs in series,…
The nonlinear rheological properties of dense colloidal suspensions under steady shear are discussed within a first principles approach. It starts from the Smoluchowski equation of interacting Brownian particles in a given shear flow,…
We perform numerical simulations of isolated, partially active polymers, driven out-of-equilibrium by a fraction of their monomers. We show that, if the active beads are all gathered in a contiguous block, the position of the section along…
Elastic properties and internal states of isotropic sphere packings are studied by numerical simulations. Several numerical protocols to assemble dense configurations are compared. One, which imitates experiments with lubricated contacts,…
Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and are used extensively in daily life and in industry. The modeling of these materials remains challenging; therefore, finding models with acceptable predictive accuracy that at the same time…
In polymer melts, the interaction between segments are considered to be screened and the ideal Gaussian chain statistics is recovered. The experimental fact that linear viscoelasticity of unentangled polymers can be well described by the…
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…
We report on the linear viscoelastic properties of mixtures comprising multiarm star (as model soft colloids) and long linear chain homopolymers in a good solvent. In contrast to earlier works, we investigated symmetric mixtures (with a…
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…
The dynamics of polymer melts at the crossover between unentagled and entangled regimes is formalized here through an extension of the Cooperative Dynamics Generalized Langevin Equation (CDGLE) (\textit{J. Chem. Phys.} 110,7574 (1999)), by…
A sheet of glassy polymers placed in a solvent shows swelling behaviors quite different from that of soft polymers (rubbers and gels). (1) Non-Fickian diffusion (called case II diffusion): As solvent permeates into the sample, a sharp front…