Related papers: Entropic Cohesion in Vitrimers
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…
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…
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…
We perform equilibrium Langevin dynamics simulations to understand the structure-viscoelasticity relationship of a dually crosslinked reversible polymer network. The cross-linking is achieved by introducing orthogonal crosslinkers (A and B)…
Vitrimers - a class of polymer networks which are covalently crosslinked and insoluble like thermosets, but flow when heated like thermoplastics - contain dynamic links and/or crosslinks that undergo an associative exchange reaction. These…
Associative polymer networks have shown a major promise in fabrication of self-healing and responsive materials. The can also serve as simple models to study more complex biological systems where transient interactions play an important…
The diffusion of small molecular penetrants through polymeric materials represents an important fundamental problem, relevant to the design of materials for applications such as coatings and membranes. Polymer networks hold promise in these…
The diffusion of molecules (penetrants) of variable size, shape, and chemistry through dense crosslinked polymer networks is a fundamental scientific problem that is broadly relevant in materials, polymer, physical and biological chemistry.…
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…
Molecular dynamic simulation enables one to correlate the evolution of the micro-structure with anisotropic stress when a material is subject to strain. The anisotropic stress due to a constant strain-rate load in a cross-linked polymer is…
Hybrid molecular dynamics/Monte Carlo simulations used to study melts of unentangled, thermoreversibly associating supramolecular polymers. In this first of a series of papers, we describe and validate a model that is effective in…
While most chemical bonds weaken under the action of mechanical force (called slip bond behavior), nature has developed bonds that do the opposite: their lifetime increases as force is applied. While such catch bonds have been studied quite…
Using molecular dynamics simulations we examine the dynamics of a family of model polymers with varying chain length and torsional potential barriers. We focus on features of the dynamics of polymers that are seen experimentally but absent…
Motivated by recent experiments showing nonlinear elasticity of in vitro networks of the biopolymer actin cross-linked with filamin, we present an effective medium theory of flexibly cross-linked stiff polymer networks. We model such…
Ring polymers are an intriguing class of polymers with unique physical properties, and understanding their behavior is important for developing accurate theoretical models. In this study, we investigate the effect of chain stiffness and…
Mixtures of polymers of varying topologies and stiffnesses display complex emergent rheological properties that often cannot be predicted from their single-component counterparts. For example, entangled blends of ring and linear polymers…
The structural properties of a linear polymer and its evolution in time have a strong bearing on its anisotropic stress response. The mean-square bond length and mean bond angle are the critical parameters that influence the time-varying…
The field of synthetic active matter has, thus far, been led by efforts to create point-like, isolated (yet interacting) self-propelled objects (\emph{e.g.} colloids, droplets, microrobots) and understanding their collective dynamics. The…
In this paper, we employ Molecular Dynamics computer simulations to study and compare the statics and dynamics of linear and circular (ring) polymer chains in entangled solutions of different densities. While we confirm that linear chain…
Elucidating the physics of a concentrated suspension of ring polymers, or of an ensemble of ring polymers in a complex environment, is an important outstanding question in polymer physics. Many of the characteristic features of these…