Aging effects in glassy polymers: a Monte Carlo study

Abstract By means of dynamic Monte Carlo simulation the physical aging of a glassy polymer melt is studied. The melt is simulated by a coarse-grained lattice model, the bond-fluctuation model, on a simple cubic lattice. In order to generate glassy freezing an energy is associated with long bonds, which leads to a competition between the energetically favored bond stretching and the local density of the melt at low temperatures. The development of this competition during the cooling process strongly slows down the structural relaxation and makes the melt freeze in an amorphous structure as soon as the internal relaxation time matches the time scale of the cooling rate. Therefore the model ex…