Brownian dynamics simulations of planar mixed flows of polymer solutions at finite concentrations

Abstract

Periodic boundary conditions for planar mixed flows are implemented in the context of a multi-chain Brownian dynamics simulation algorithm. The effect of shear rate $\dot{\gamma }$, and extension rate $\dot{\epsilon }$, on the size of polymer chains, $⟨R_e^2⟩$, and on the polymer contribution to viscosity, $\eta$, is examined for solutions of FENE dumbbells at finite concentrations, with excluded volume interactions between the beads taken into account. The influence of the mixedness parameter, $\chi$, and flow strength, $\dot{\Gamma }$, on $⟨R_e^2⟩$ and $\eta$, is also examined, where $\chi \to 0$ corresponds to pure shear flow, and $\chi \to 1$ corresponds to pure extensional flow. It is shown that there exists a critical value, ${\chi }_{\text{c}}$, such that the flow is shear dominated for $\chi <{\chi }_{\text{c}}$, and extension dominated for $\chi >{\chi }_{\text{c}}$.

18 pages, 12 figures, to appear in Chemical Engineering Science

References in corpus (3)

• Self-diffusion and Cooperative Diffusion in Semidilute Polymer Solutions as measured by Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy
• Optimisation of a Brownian dynamics algorithm for semidilute polymer solutions
• Dynamic crossover scaling in polymer solutions

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