Multipoint segmental repulsive potential for entangled polymer simulations with dissipative particle dynamics

N Iwaoka and K Hagita and H Takano, JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS, 149, 114901 (2018).

DOI: 10.1063/1.5046755

A model is developed for simulating entangled polymers by dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) using the segmental repulsive potential (SRP). In contrast to previous SRP models that define a single-point interaction on each bond, the proposed SRP model applies a dynamically adjustable multipoint on the bond. Previous SRP models could not reproduce the equilibrium properties of Groot and Warren's original DPD model R. D. Groot and P. B. Warren, J. Chem. Phys. 107, 4423 (1997) because the introduction of a single SRP induces a large excluded volume, whereas, the proposed multipoint SRP (MP-SRP) introduces a cylindrical effective excluded bond volume. We demonstrate that our MP- SRP model exhibits equilibrium properties similar to those of the original DPD polymers. The MP-SRP model parameters are determined by monitoring the number of topology violations, thermodynamic properties, and the polymer internal structure. We examine two typical DPD polymers with different bond-length distributions; one of them was used in the modified SRP model by Sirk et al. J. Chem. Phys. 136, 134903 (2012), whereas the other was used in the original DPD model. We demonstrate that for both polymers, the proposed MP-SRP model captures the entangled behaviors of a polymer melt naturally, by calculating the slowest relaxation time of a chain in the melt and the shear relaxation modulus. The results indicate that the proposed MP-SRP model can be applied to a variety of DPD polymers. Published by AIP Publishing.

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