Shear banding in molecular dynamics of polymer melts

Cao, J. and Likhtman, A. E. (2012) Shear banding in molecular dynamics of polymer melts. Physical Review Letters, 108 (2). 028302. ISSN 0031-9007 doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.028302

Abstract/Summary

In order to establish constitutive equations for a viscoelastic fluid uniform shear flow is usually required. However, in the last 10 years S. Q. Wang and co-workers have demonstrated that some entangled polymers do not flow with the uniform shear rate as usually assumed, but instead choose to separate into fast and slow flowing regions. This phenomenon, known as shear banding, causes flow instabilities and in principle invalidates all rheological measurements when it occurs. In this Letter we report the first observation of shear banding in molecular dynamics simulations of entangled polymer melts. We show that our observations are in a very good agreement with the phenomenology developed by Fielding and Olmsted. Our findings provide a simple way of validating the empirical macroscopic phenomenology of shear banding. © 2012 American Physical Society

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/29426
Identification Number/DOI	10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.028302
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Publisher	American Physical Society
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