Demonstration of reinforcement in polymer composite with rings penetrating the diamond-lattice network

K Hagita and T Murashima and H Jinnai, POLYMER, 243, 124637 (2022).

DOI: 10.1016/j.polymer.2022.124637

To study the qualitative behavior of large rings embedded in crosslinked polymer networks, the effect of large rings on the stress-strain curve was examined by coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation of the Kremer-Grest model. In this study, large rings were embedded in the diamond-lattice polymer network based on the push-off procedure for ring pure melts and polymer network. To investigate the difference in behaviors with respect to strand penetration into a ring, we applied the chain shrinking process based on the primitive path analysis. We found that the large-sized rings were widely spread and interfered with each other in the network. We evaluated stress-strain curves under uniaxial elongation as a function of the ring size (number of beads per ring Nring) and ring fraction fring. It was found that the nominal stress increased with the increasing Nring and/or fring although the increase is limited owing to the interference of rings. Changes in the ring shape were observed under uniaxial elongation in terms of the gyration radius Rg2, ratio lambda 1/Rg2, and asphericity A, where lambda 1 denotes the first eigenvalue of the gyration tensor. We confirmed that the rings embedded in crosslinked network certainly play roles as movable crosslinks and reinforce the network.

Return to Publications page