Supercoiled ring polymers under shear flow

Abstract

We apply monomer-resolved computer simulations of supercoiled ring polymers under shear, taking full account of the hydrodynamic interactions, accompanied, in parallel, by simulations in which these are switched off. The combination of bending and torsional rigidities inherent in these polymers, in conjunction with hydrodynamics, has a profound impact on their flow properties. In contrast to their flexible counterparts, which dramatcially deform and inflate under shear [Liebetreu et al., Commun. Mater. 1, 4 (2020)], supercoiled rings undergo only weak changes in their overall shape and they display both a reduced propensity to tumbling (at fixed Weissenberg number) and a much stronger orientational resistance with respect to their flexible counterparts. In the presence of hydrodynamic interactions, the coupling of the polymer to solvent flow is capable of bringing about a topological transformation of writhe to twist at strong shear upon conservation of the overall linking number.

19 pages, 12 figures; accepted for publication in Nanoscale

References in corpus (8)

• Molecular Dynamics Simulation Study of Nonconcatenated Ring Polymers in a Melt: I. Statics
• Lattice Boltzmann simulations of soft matter systems
• Comparison of Dissipative Particle Dynamics and Langevin thermostats for out-of-equilibrium simulations of polymeric systems
• Spontaneous knotting and unknotting of flexible linear polymers: equilibrium and kinetic aspects
• Topological Linking Drives Anomalous Thickening of Ring Polymers In Weak Extensional Flows
• Migration of semiflexible polymers in microcapillary flow
• Mesoscale simulations of polymer dynamics in microchannel flows
• Thermostat for non-equilibrium multiparticle collision dynamics simulations