Dynamic Simulation of Entangled Polymers undergoing Deformation
Department
Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
Major
Chemical Engineering
Research Advisor
Park, Joontaek
Advisor's Department
Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
Abstract
Polymeric liquids possess complex properties that significantly deviate from Newtonian fluids. Therefore, understanding such abnormal flow behaviors is important in industrial applications. This study implements the stochastic-tube model to dynamically simulate polymer chains. These were placed under a constant shear rate for a certain amount of time and analyzed to ascertain whether the polymer chains undergo a “tumbling” motion and determine how the extent of linearity changes with time for different shear rates. The tumbling is also quantified in terms of a newly introduced variable. The simulation results indicate that the polymer chains exhibit a significant tendency to elongate at higher shear rates and occasionally experience tumbling, while lower shear rates tend to exhibit very infrequent tumbling and slight elongation. These results may help explain the inverse sigmoidal behavior of polymer viscosity vs. shear rate. Comparison of dynamic behaviors under shear and extension is also made.
Biography
Cody Spratt is a senior undergraduate chemical engineering student at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Cody has worked with Dr. Joontaek Park on the polymer deformation simulation project from August 2013 to December 2013 and from January 2015 to April 2015. His contributions include writing/editing Matlab code to display polymer configurations in three-dimensional graphs, developing calculation methods to quantify polymer tumbling and extension, and generating organized displays of data that directly reflect the simulated polymer behavior.
Research Category
Engineering
Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Document Type
Presentation
Award
Engineering oral presentation, Second place
Location
St. Pat's B
Presentation Date
15 Apr 2015, 2:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Dynamic Simulation of Entangled Polymers undergoing Deformation
St. Pat's B
Polymeric liquids possess complex properties that significantly deviate from Newtonian fluids. Therefore, understanding such abnormal flow behaviors is important in industrial applications. This study implements the stochastic-tube model to dynamically simulate polymer chains. These were placed under a constant shear rate for a certain amount of time and analyzed to ascertain whether the polymer chains undergo a “tumbling” motion and determine how the extent of linearity changes with time for different shear rates. The tumbling is also quantified in terms of a newly introduced variable. The simulation results indicate that the polymer chains exhibit a significant tendency to elongate at higher shear rates and occasionally experience tumbling, while lower shear rates tend to exhibit very infrequent tumbling and slight elongation. These results may help explain the inverse sigmoidal behavior of polymer viscosity vs. shear rate. Comparison of dynamic behaviors under shear and extension is also made.
Comments
Joint project with Tong Mou