Nonmonotonic dependence of polymer glass mechanical response on chain bending stiffness

Abstract

We investigate the mechanical properties of amorphous polymers by means of coarse-grained simulations and nonaffine lattice dynamics theory. A small increase of polymer chain bending stiffness leads first to softening of the material, while hardening happens only upon further strengthening of the backbones. This nonmonotonic variation of the storage modulus $G^{\prime }$ with bending stiffness is caused by a competition between additional resistance to deformation offered by stiffer backbones and decreased density of the material due to a necessary decrease in monomer-monomer coordination. This counter-intuitive finding suggests that the strength of polymer glasses may in some circumstances be enhanced by softening the bending of constituent chains.

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• Universal $L^{-3}$ finite-size effects in the viscoelasticity of confined amorphous systems
• Scaling up the lattice dynamics of amorphous materials by orders of magnitude
• Timescale bridging in atomistic simulations of epoxy polymer mechanics using non-affine deformation theory
• Understanding the scaling of boson peak through insensitivity of elastic heterogeneity to bending rigidity in polymer glasses
• Effects of spherical confinement and backbone stiffness on flexible polymer jamming