Related papers: Entropic phase separation in polymer--vitrimer mel…
Whereas entropy can induce phase behavior that is as rich as seen in energetic systems, microphase separation remains a very rare phenomenon in entropic systems. In this paper, we present a density functional approach to study the…
Progressive damage, which eventually leads to failure, is ubiquitous in biological and synthetic polymers. The simplest case to consider is that of elastomeric materials, which can undergo large reversible deformations with negligible rate…
Polymerization and formation of crosslinked polymer networks are important processes in manufacturing, materials fabrication, and in the case of hydrated polymer networks, synthesis of biomedical materials, drug delivery, and tissue…
Nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations are used to study the deformation behavior of disperse polymer melts by tracking test chains of length N = Mw, the weight average molecular weight, in melts of varying dispersity. At high strain…
A physics-based analytical model describing the phase transition from crystalline to conformationally disordered (condis) crystalline phase is developed. In the model, the free energy is written as a function of temperature and the lattice…
We introduce a lattice model of glass transition in polymer globules. This model exhibits a novel scenario of ergodicity breaking in which the disjoint regions of phase space do not arise uniformly, but as small chambers whose number…
We apply the computational methodology of phase retrieval to the problem of folding heteropolymers. The ground state fold of the polymer is defined by the intersection of two sets in the configuration space of its constituent monomers: a…
Colloidal suspensions with free polymer coils which are larger than the colloidal particles are considered. The polymer-colloid interaction is modeled by an extension of the Asakura-Oosawa model. Phase separation occurs into dilute and…
Elastic MicroPhase Separation (EMPS) provides a simple route to create soft materials with homogeneous microstructures by leveraging the supersaturation of crosslinked polymer networks with liquids. At low supersaturation, network…
We present a Bethe approximation to study lattice models of linear polymers. The approach is variational in nature and based on the cluster variation method (CVM). We focus on a model with $(i)$ a nearest neighbor attractive energy…
In frameworks of scaling theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena the structure of melt-crystallized polymers is discussed. The model constructed follows drawing polymeric materials and dissipating the energy during the transition…
We investigate the behaviour of randomly cross-linked (co)polymer blends using a combination of replica theory and large-scale molecular dynamics simulations. In particular, we derive the analogue of the random phase approximation for…
Conformational phases of a semiflexible off-lattice homopolymer model near an attractive substrate are investigated by means of multicanonical computer simulations. In our polymer-substrate model, nonbonded pairs of monomers as well as…
We report molecular dynamics simulations of a system of repulsive, polymer-tethered colloidal particles. We use an explicit polymer model to explore how the length and the behavior of the polymer (ideal or self-avoiding) affect the ability…
Deformations of amorphous polymer networks prepared with significant concentrations of liquid crystalline mesogens have been recently reported to undergo mechanotropic phase transitions. Here, we report that these mechanotropic phase…
The statistical theory of polymers tethered around the inner surface of a cylindrical channel has traditionally employed the assumption that the equilibrium density of the polymers is independent of the azimuthal coordinate. However,…
A molecular model is proposed of a bilayer consisting of fully saturated DPPC and mono unsaturated DOPC. The model not only encompasses the constant density within the hydrophobic core of the bilayer, but also the tendency of chain segments…
We study how solidification of model freely rotating polymers under athermal quasistatic compression varies with their bond angle $\theta_0$. All systems undergo two discrete, first-order-like transitions: entanglement at $\phi =…
We investigate the universality of entanglement kinetics in polymer melts. We compare predictions of a recently developed constitutive equation for disentanglement to molecular dynamics simulations of both united-atom polyethylene and…
Trapping macromolecules in nanopits finds multifarious applications in polymer separation, filtering biomolecules etc. However, tuning the locomotion of polymers in channels of nanoscopic dimensions is greatly restricted by the comparative…