Related papers: Continuum Theory of Polymer Crystallization
The structural arrest of a polymeric suspension might be driven by an increase of the cross--linker concentration, that drives the gel transition, as well as by an increase of the polymer density, that induces a glass transition. These…
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…
The nucleation and growth of clusters in a progressively cooled vapor is studied. The chemical-potential of the vapor increases, resulting in a rapidly increasing nucleation rate. The growth of the newly created clusters depletes monomers,…
The Langevin Equation for cooperative dynamics represents the dynamics of polymer melts with chains of increasing degree of polymerization, covering the full range of behavior from the unentangled to the entangled regime. This equation…
Dimerization and subsequent aggregation of polymers and biopolymers often occur under nonequilibrium conditions. When the initial state of the polymer is not collapsed or the final folded native state, the dynamics of dimerization can…
We report on an extensive study of craze formation in glassy polymers. Molecular dynamics simulations of a coarse-grained bead-spring model were employed to investigate the molecular level processes during craze nucleation, widening, and…
We have mapped the physics of polymer melts onto a time-dependent Landau-Ginzburg $|\psi|^4$ field theory using techniques of functional integration. Time in the theory is simply a label for the location of a given monomer along the extent…
In this study, a comprehensive view of a model crystal formation in a complex fluctuating medium is presented. The model incorporates Gaussian curvature effects at the crystal boundary as well as the possibility for superdiffusive motion…
Polymer blends offer an exciting material for various potential applications due to their tunable properties by varying constituting components and their relative composition. Our simulation results unravel an intrinsic relationship between…
Control of the crystallization process at the microscopic level makes it possible to generate the nanocrystalline samples with the desired structural and morphological properties, that is of great importance for modern industry. In the…
If many micelles adsorb onto the same polymer molecule then they are said to form a necklace. A minimal model of such a necklace is proposed and shown to be almost equivalent to a 1-dimensional fluid with nearest-neighbour interactions. The…
The glass transition in binary mixtures of star polymers is studied by mode coupling theory and extensive molecular dynamics computer simulations. In particular, we have explored vitrification in the parameter space of size asymmetry…
A theory of drop-wise addition polymerization is developed. Because of the linear growth of the reaction volume V, the system gives rise to a new type of distribution function for cyclic species that can be expressed by the sum of two…
The kinetics and microstructure of solid-phase crystallization under continuous heating conditions and random distribution of nuclei are analyzed. An Arrhenius temperature dependence is assumed for both nucleation and growth rates. Under…
Molecular dynamics simulation of a generic polymer model is applied to study melts of polymers with different types of intrinsic stiffness. Important static observables of the single chain such as gyration radius or persistence length are…
We discuss the microscopic mechanisms by which low-temperature amorphous states, such as ultrastable glasses, transform into equilibrium fluids, after a sudden temperature increase. Experiments suggest that this process is similar to the…
A new approach that is a combination of classical thermodynamics and macroscopic kinetics is offered for studying the nucleation kinetics in condensed binary solutions. The theory covers the separation of liquid and solid solutions…
A mode-coupling theory for dense polymeric systems is developed which unifyingly incorporates the segmental cage effect relevant for structural slowing down and polymer chain conformational degrees of freedom. An ideal glass transition of…
The competition between crystallization and vitrification in glass-forming materials manifests as a non-monotonic behavior in the time-temperature transformation (TTT) diagrams, which quantify the time scales for crystallization as a…
We present a detailed study of the static and dynamic behavior of long semiflexible polymer chains in a melt. Starting from previously obtained fully equilibrated high molecular weight polymer melts [{\it Zhang et al.} ACS Macro Lett. 3,…