Related papers: Rethinking failure in polymer networks: a probabil…
The mechanical properties of molecules are today captured by single molecule manipulation experiments, so that polymer features are tested at a nanometric scale. Yet devising mathematical models to get further insight beyond the commonly…
The two approaches to analyzing the large strain behavior of rubbery networks are phenomenologically, using strain energy functions drawn from continuum mechanics, and molecular models, which apply statistical mechanics to compute the…
Molecular dynamics simulation methods are used to study the folding of polymer chains into packed cubic states. The polymer model, based on a chain of linked sites moving in the continuum, includes both excluded volume and torsional…
We study fracture processes within a stochastic fiber-bundle model where it is assumed that after the failure of a fiber, each intact fiber obtains a random fraction of the failing load. Within a Markov approximation, the breakdown…
The fracture and severing of polymer chains plays a critical role in the failure of fibrous materials and the regulated turnover of intracellular filaments. Using continuum wormlike chain models, we investigate the fracture of semiflexible…
The fracture of end-linked polymer networks and gels has a significant impact on the performance of these versatile and widely used materials, and a molecular-level understanding of the fracture process is crucial for the design of new…
We investigate crack propagation in a simple two-dimensional visco-elastic model and find a scaling regime in the relation between the propagation velocity and energy release rate or fracture energy, together with lower and upper bounds of…
Disorder and long-range interactions are two of the key components that make material failure an interesting playfield for the application of statistical mechanics. The cornerstone in this respect has been lattice models of the fracture in…
Classical network elasticity theories are based on the concept of flexible volumeless polymers fixed into a network in which there are no excluded volume, or even topological interactions, and where the chains explore accessible…
Discrete mesoscale network models, in which explicitly modeled polymer chains are replaced by implicit pairwise potentials, are capable of predicting the macroscale mechanical response of polymeric materials such as elastomers and gels,…
Fragmentation can be observed in nature and in everyday life on a wide range of length scales and for all kinds of technical applications. Most studies on dynamic failure focus on the behaviour of bulk systems in one, two and three…
This study investigated the fracture of star polymer networks made from prepolymers with various arm molecular weights in the range $2 \leq N_a \leq 0$, for node functionalities $3 \leq f \leq 8$ and conversion ratios…
Constitutive equations are derived for the time-dependent behavior of particle-reinforced elastomers at isothermal loading with finite strains. A rubbery polymer is modelled as a network of macromolecules bridged by junctions which can slip…
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…
Based on a recent simulation study [Masubuchi et al., Macromolecules, 56, 9359 (2023)], the cycle rank plays a significant role in determining the fracture characteristics of network polymers. However, the study only considered…
The elasticity of rubbery polymer networks has been considered to be entropy-driven. On the other hand, studies on single polymer chain mechanics have revealed that the elasticity of ultimately stretched polymer chains is dominated by the…
The stress response of polymer double networks depends not only on the properties of the constituent networks, but also on the interactions arising between them. Here we demonstrate, via coarse-grained simulations, that both their global…
Due to their unique structural and mechanical properties, randomly-crosslinked polymer networks play an important role in many different fields, ranging from cellular biology to industrial processes. In order to elucidate how these…
Statistical mechanics is an important tool for understanding polymer electroelasticity because the elasticity of polymers is primarily due to entropy. However, a common approach for the statistical mechanics of polymer chains, the Gaussian…
Fujiyabu et al. have experimentally reported that mixing of 3-arm star prepolymers into 4-arm analog improves the toughness of the resultant polymer networks compared to the base network composed of 4-arm star polymers only. For the…