Kremer–Grest Models for Commodity Polymer Melts: Linking Theory, Experiment, and Simulation at the Kuhn Scale

By Ralf Everaers, H. A. Karimi‐Varzaneh, F. Fleck, Nils W. Hojdis, Carsten Svaneborg. Macromolecules, 2018

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The Kremer-Grest (KG) polymer model is a standard model for studying generic polymer properties in Molecular Dynamics simulations. It owes its popula rity to its simplicity and computational efficiency, rather than its ability to represent specific polymers species and conditions. Here we show, that by tuning the chain stiffness it is possible to adapt the KG model to model melts of real polymers. In particular, we provide mapping relations from KG to SI units for a wide range of commodity polymers. The connection between the experimental and the KG melts is made at the Kuhn scale, i.e. at the crossover from chemistry-specific small scale to the universal large scale behavior. We expect the KG models to faithfully represent universal properties dominated by the large scale conformational statistics and dynamics of flexible polymers. In particular, we observe very good agreement between entanglement moduli of our KG models and the experimental moduli of the target polyme rs.

Subfields: Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes, Materials Chemistry, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/40bd6117e3cf25403c6cc367ce00be96c329d555