Related papers: Entropic Cohesion in Vitrimers
By taking advantage of the molecular weight dependence of the glass transition of polymers and their ability to form perfectly miscible blends, we propose a way to modify the fragility of a system, from fragile to strong, keeping the same…
In many industrial processes, pieces of the same polymer material are brought into contact at a temperature above the glass transition. Interdiffusion then takes place across the interface and leads to a strengthening of the junction.…
We consider a biopolymer bundle consisting of filaments that are crosslinked together. The crosslinks are reversible: they can dynamically bind and unbind adjacent filament pairs as controlled by a binding enthalpy. The bundle is subjected…
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…
Here, we provide an overview of theoretical approaches to semiflexible polymers and their networks. Such semiflexible polymers have large bending rigidities that can compete with the entropic tendency of a chain to crumple up into a random…
While the dynamics of polymer chains in equilibrium media is well understood by now, the polymer dynamics in active non-equilibrium environments can be very different. Here we study the dynamics of polymers in a viscous medium containing…
This paper extends a field-theoretical dynamical networking formalism for mesoscopic polymer dynamics to explicitly include dedicated cross-linker particles. Cross-linkers are represented within a Martin-Siggia-Rose generating functional…
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…
Understanding how topological constraints affect the dynamics of polymers in solution is at the basis of any polymer theory and it is particularly needed for melts of rings. These polymers fold as crumpled and space-filling objects and,…
The cavitation flow of linear-polymer solutions around a cylinder is studied by performing a large-scale molecular dynamics simulation. The addition of polymer chains remarkably suppresses the cavitation. The polymers are stretched into a…
Diffusive transport of small molecules within the internal structures of biological and synthetic material systems is complex because the crowded environment presents chemical and physical barriers to mobility. We explored this mobility…
When injected through a contraction, high molecular weight polymer solutions exhibit a sharp increase of apparent viscosity which originates from stretching polymer chains above a critical extension rate. This chain stretching can also…
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…
Active polymers possess numerous unique properties that are quite different from those observed in the system of small active molecule due to the intricate interplay between their activity and topological constraints. This study focuses on…
Polymers with active segments constitute prospective future materials and are used as a model for some biological systems such as chromatin. The directions of the active forces are typically introduced with temporal or spatial correlations…
The dynamical properties of entangled polymers originate from the dynamic constraints due to the uncrossability between polymer chains. We propose a highly coarse-grained simulation model with transient bonds for such dynamically…
While various structural and dynamical precursors to vitrification have been identified, a predictive and quantitative description of how subtle changes at the microscopic scale give rise to the steep growth in macroscopic viscosity is…
We study the interplay between entropy and topological constraints for a polymer chain in which sliding rings (slip-links) enforce pair contacts between monomers. These slip-links divide a closed ring polymer into a number of sub-loops…
We present a theoretical framework for the linear and nonlinear visco-elastic properties of reversibly crosslinked networks of semiflexible polymers. In contrast to affine models where network strain couples to the polymer end-to-end…
Biological molecules can form hydrogen bonds between nearby residues, leading to helical secondary structures. The associated reduction of configurational entropy leads to a temperature dependence of this effect: the "helix-coil…