Search results for "Monte Carlo method."

Dynamics of confined polymer melts: Recent Monte Carlo simulation results

2000

The dynamic behavior of thin polymer films is studied by Monte Carlo simulations of a simplified lattice model. The film geometry is realized by two opposite hard walls whose distance is varied in the simulations. In the films the dynamics is accelerated with respect to the bulk, leading to a decrease of the extrapolated glass transition temperature with decreasing film thickness.

Polymer solutions confined in slit-like pores with attractive walls: An off-lattice Monte Carlo study of static properties and chain dynamics

1996

Using a bead spring model of flexible polymer chains, the density profiles and chain configurational properties of polymer solutions confined between parallel plates were studied. A wide range of density ϕ, chain length N, and strength e of a short-range attractive wall potential was investigated. Both a temperature T in the good solvent regime (T > θ, θ being the Theta temperature where a chain in unconfined bulk three-dimensional solution would behave ideally) and a temperature in the bad solvent regime (T θ) show a crossover from two-dimensional excluded volume behavior (Rg ∝ N2ν with ν = 3/4) to ideal random walk behavior (ν = 1/2), the relaxation times show effective exponents Zeff (τ …

1988

Monte Carlo simulations are presented for binary (AB) symmetric polymer mixtures (chain lengths NANBN) for the case that an attractive interaction ϵ exists between monomers of the same kind, and the limiting case that one species (B) is very diluted. It is shown that with increasing interaction strength ϵ/(kB · T), T being the absolute temperature, the minority chains collapse to a very dense configuration, while the majority chains stay nearly Gaussian. Both chain radii, structure factors and numbers of nearest neighbour contacts are discussed.

Polymer Films in the Normal-Liquid and Supercooled State: A Review of Recent Monte Carlo Simulation Results

2000

This paper reviews recent Monte Carlo simulation studies of the glassy behavior in thin polymer films. The simulations employ a version of the bond-fluctuation lattice model, in which the glass transition is driven by the competition between a stiffening of the polymers and their dense packing in the melt. The melt is geometrically confined between two impenetrable walls separated by distances ranging from once to about fifteen times the bulk radius of gyration. The confinement influences static and dynamic properties of the films: Chains close to the wall preferentially orient parallel to it. This orientation tendency propagates through the film and leads to a layer structure at low temper…

Dragging a Polymer Chain into a Nanotube and Subsequent Release

2008

We present a scaling theory and Monte Carlo (MC) simulation results for a flexible polymer chain slowly dragged by one end into a nanotube. We also describe the situation when the completely confined chain is released and gradually leaves the tube. MC simulations were performed for a self-avoiding lattice model with a biased chain growth algorithm, the pruned-enriched Rosenbluth method. The nanotube is a long channel opened at one end and its diameter $D$ is much smaller than the size of the polymer coil in solution. We analyze the following characteristics as functions of the chain end position $x$ inside the tube: the free energy of confinement, the average end-to-end distance, the averag…

Dynamics of Glassy Polymer Melts in Confined Geometry: A Monte Carlo Simulation

1996

Dynamic properties of a dense polymer melt confined between two hard walls are investigated over a wide range of temperatures by dynamic Monte Carlo simulation. The temperature interval ranges from the ordinary liquid to the strongly supercooled melt. The influence of temperature, density and confinement on the polymer dynamics is studied by various mean-square displacements, structural relaxation functions and quantities derived from them (relaxation times, apparent diffusion coefficients, monomer relaxation rates), yielding the following results: The motion of the monomers and polymers close to the walls is enhanced in parallel, but reduced in perpendicular direction. This dynamic anisotr…

Unmixing of Polymer Blends Confined in Ultrathin Films:  Crossover between Two-Dimensional and Three-Dimensional Behavior

2006

The interplay between chain conformations and phase separation in binary symmetric polymer mixtures confined into thin films by "neutral" hard walls (i.e., walls that do not preferentially attract or repel one of the two components of the mixture) is studied by Monte Carlo simulations. Using the bond fluctuation model on a simple cubic lattice in the semi grand canonical ensemble, we locate the critical temperature of demixing via finite size scaling methods for a wide range of chain lengths (16/= N/= 256 effective monomers per chain) and film thicknesses (2/= D/= 19 lattice spacings). Simultaneously, we investigate the geometrical structure of the chains, showing that despite using melt de…

Multi-scale simulations of polymeric nanoparticle aggregation during rapid solvent exchange.

2018

Using a multi-scale approach which combines both molecular dynamics (MD) and kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulations, we study a simple and scalable method for fabricating charge-stabilized nanoparticles through a rapid solvent exchange, i.e., Flash NanoPrecipitation (FNP). This multi-scale approach is based on microscopic information from MD simulations and uses a KMC algorithm to access macroscopic length- and time scales, which allows direct comparison with experiments and quantitative predictions. We find good agreement of our simulation results with the experiments. In addition, the model allows us to understand the aggregation mechanism on both microscopic and macroscopic levels and det…

Molecular Simulation of Polymer Melts and Blends: Methods, Phase Behavior, Interfaces, and Surfaces

2016

Penetrant diffusion in frozen polymer matrices: A finite-size scaling study of free volume percolation

1996

The diffusion of penetrant particles in frozen polymer matrices is investigated by means of Monte Carlo simulations of the bond fluctuation model. By applying finite-size scaling to data obtained from very large systems it is demonstrated that the diffusion process takes place on a percolating free volume cluster describable by a correlated site percolation model which falls into the same universality class as random percolation. The diverging correlation length entails a pronounced dependence of the diffusion constant on the size of the simulated system. It is shown that this dependence is appreciable for a wide range of parameters around the transition. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American …