Related papers: Why do Thin Polymer Films Melt at Lower Temperatur…
Freestanding thin polymer films with high molecular weights exhibit an anomalous decrease in the glass-transition temperature with film thickness. Specifically, in such materials, the measured glass-transition temperature evolves in an…
The glass transition is a long-standing unsolved problem in materials science. For polymers, our understanding of glass-formation is particularly poor due to the added complexity of chain connectivity and flexibility; structural relaxation…
Latest since the landmark studies of Kovacs and co-workers on the glass transition of polymers, it is clear that thermally induced volume changes are of central importance for the understanding of the nature of the glass transition. Due to…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations of an idealized polymer melt surrounding a nanoscopic filler particle to probe the effects of a filler on the local melt structure and dynamics. We show that the glass transition temperature $T_g$…
Dewetting of thin polystyrene films deposited onto silicone wafers at temperatures close to the glass transition exhibits unusual dynamics and front morphologies. Here, we present a new theoretical approach of these phenomena taking into…
To study the cooling behavior and the glass transition of polymer melts in bulk and with free surfaces a coarse-grained weakly semi-flexible polymer model is developed. Based on a standard bead spring model with purely repulsive…
Searching for the ideal glass transition, we exploit the ability of glassy polymer films to explore low energy states in remarkably short time scales. We use 30 nm thick polystyrene (PS) films, which in the supercooled state basically…
We measure the isothermal rejuvenation of stable glass films of poly(styrene) and poly(methylmethacrylate). We demonstrate that the propagation of the front responsible for the transformation to a supercooled-liquid state can serve as a…
We study the onset of rigidity near the glass transition (GT) in a short-chain polymer melt modelled by a bead-spring model, where all beads interact with Lennard-Jones potentials. The properties of the system are examined above and below…
The dynamic and static properties of a supercooled (non-entangled) polymer melt are investigated via molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The system is confined between two completely smooth and purely repulsive walls. The wall-to-wall…
Polymer self-adhesion due to the interdiffusion of macromolecules has been an active area of research for several decades [70, 43, 62, 42, 72, 73, 41]. Here, we report a new phenomenon of sub-Tg, solid-state, plasticity-induced bonding;…
We present a modified version of our "sliding model", where chain arcs, between two contacts at the surface, may move if all the barriers along the arc are weaker than a certain threshold.An important advance of the revised model is that…
When the cooling rate $v$ is smaller than a certain material-dependent threshold, the glass transition temperature $T_g$ becomes to a certain degree the "material parameter" being nearly independent on the cooling rate. The common method to…
To stabilize the working temperature of an equipment, a solid-state thermal resistor is usually a requisite, which could adjust its heat conductance continuously according to the temperature. In this work, the thermal conductivity and the…
Changes in the dynamics of supported polymer films in comparison to bulk materials involve a complex convolution of effects, such as substrate interactions, roughness and compliance, in addition to film thickness. We consider molecular…
Glass transition behavior of nanoscopically thin polymer films is investigated by means of molecular dynamics simulations. A thin polymer film that is composed of bead-spring model chains and supported on an idealized, fcc lattice substrate…
We study experimentally the molecular weight $M$ dependence of spreading rates of molecularly thin precursor films, growing at the bottom of droplets of polymer liquids. In accord with previous observations, we find that the radial…
The low temperature properties of glass are distinct from those of crystals due to the presence of poorly understood low-energy excitations. The tunneling model proposes that these are atoms tunneling between nearby equilibria, forming…
Understanding the nature of glass transition, as well as precise estimation of the glass transition temperature for polymeric materials, remain open questions in both experimental and theoretical polymer sciences. We propose a data-driven…
Metal mixed polymers are a cheap and effective way to produce flexible metals and superconductors. As part of an on-going effort to learn how to tune the properties of these systems with ion implantation, we present a study of the…