Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Dispersion and Shear Viscosity of a Simulated Polymer Nanocomposite

Published

Author(s)

Francis W. Starr, Jack F. Douglas, S C. Glotzer

Abstract

Using molecular dynamics simulations, we explore properties affecting nano-filler dispersion in a dense bead-spring polymer melt, and how the state of dispersion alters the response of the system to shear. We determine a simple metric to determine the state of dispersion, which we verify both by visual inspection of the simulated configurations and the structure factor. This measure allows us the determine the behavior of the crossover from clustered to dispersed states, which we show is compatible with a simple model of equilibrium polymerization. Additionally, we find that the effects of temperature and polymer-nanoparticle interactions are largely interchangeable. Hence it might be possible that temperature, rather than complicated functionalization, may be used to control nanoparticle dispersion in some systems. Finally, we show that shear, particularly important under processing conditions, favors dispersion in our systems.
Citation
Macromolecules

Keywords

associating transition, dispersion, nanocomposite, shear

Citation

Starr, F. , Douglas, J. and Glotzer, S. (2008), Dispersion and Shear Viscosity of a Simulated Polymer Nanocomposite, Macromolecules (Accessed October 3, 2024)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact reflib@nist.gov.

Created October 16, 2008