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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…
Polymers in a turbulent flow are subject to intense strain, which can cause their scission and thereby limit the experimental study and application of phenomena such as turbulent drag reduction and elastic turbulence. In this paper, we…
The effects of elasticity on filament thinning and breakup are investigated in microchannel cross flow. When a viscous solution is stretched by an external immiscible fluid, a low 100 ppm polymer concentration strongly affects the breakup…
Disordered networks of fragile elastic elements have been proposed as a model for inner porous regions of large bones [Gunaratne et.al., cond-mat/0009221]. In numerical studies, weakening of such networks is seen to be accompanied by…
We study the spontaneous out-of-plane bending of a planar untwisted ribbon composed of nematic polymer networks activated by a change in temperature. Our theory accounts for both stretching and bending energies, which compete to establish…
The stretchability of polymeric materials is critical to many applications such as stretchable electronics and soft robotics, yet the stretchability of conventional cross-linked linear polymers is limited by the entanglements between…
Interest in the protein folding problem has motivated a wide range of theoretical and experimental studies of the kinetics of the collapse of flexible homopolymers. In this Paper a phenomenological model is proposed for the kinetics of the…
We visualize entanglements in polymer melts using molecular dynamics simulation. A bead at an entanglement interacts persistently for long times with the non-bonded beads (those excluding the adjacent ones in the same chain). The…
We study computationally the creep and yielding of athermal gels and fibre network materials under a constant imposed shear stress, within a minimal model of interconnected filaments with central forces in $d=2$ spatial dimensions. Each…
It is commonly accepted that in concentrated solutions or melts high-molecular weight polymers display random-walk conformational properties without long-range correlations between subsequent bonds. This absence of memory means, for…
Athermal models of disordered fibrous networks are highly useful for studying the mechanics of elastic networks composed of stiff biopolymers. The underlying network architecture is a key aspect that can affect the elastic properties of…
We investigate the effect of knot type on the properties of a ring polymer confined to a slit. For relatively wide slits, the more complex the knot, the more the force exerted by the polymer on the walls is decreased compared to an…
Observations are reported in isothermal torsional oscillation tests on melts of isotactic polypropylene (iPP) and low-density polyethylene (LDPE) in the intervals of temperature between 190 and 250C (iPP) and between 120 and 190C (LDPE).…
The statistical mechanics of a long knotted collapsed polymer is determined by a free-energy with a knot-dependent subleading term, which is linked to the length of the shortest polymer that can hold such knot. The only other parameter…
This study investigated the coalescence of polymer solution drops on the solid substrates. When two drops meet at their contact line on a substrate, the liquid bridge connecting the two drops increases in size with time. The height and…
Using Langevin Dynamic simulations, we study effects of the shear force on the rupture of a double stranded DNA molecule. The model studied here contains two single diblock copolymers interacting with each other. The elastic constants of…
Networks of elastic beams can deform either by stretching or bending of their members. The primary mode of deformation (bending or stretching) crucially depends on the specific details of the network architecture. In order to shed light on…
Thermal welding of polymer-polymer interfaces is important for integrating polymeric elements into devices. When two different polymers are joined, the strength of the weld depends critically on the degree of immiscibility. We perform…
Crack nucleation is a ubiquitous phenomena during materials failure, because stress focuses on crack tips. It is known that exceptions to this general rule arise in the limit of strong disorder or vanishing mechanical stability, where…
We study the structural and dynamical mechanisms of reinforcement of a polymer nanocomposite (PNC) via coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. In a regime of strong polymer-filler interactions, the stress at failure of the PNC is…