TY - JOUR
T1 - A 2-D Kinetic Theory for Flows of Monodomain Polymer-Rod Nanocomposites
AU - M. Gregory Forest, Qingqing Liao & Qi Wang
JO - Communications in Computational Physics
VL - 2
SP - 250
EP - 282
PY - 2010
DA - 2010/02
SN - 7
DO - http://doi.org/10.4208/cicp.2009.08.204
UR - https://global-sci.org/intro/article_detail/cicp/7628.html
KW - 
AB - <p style="text-align: justify;">We merge classical kinetic theories [M. Doi and S. F. Edwards, The Theory
of Polymer Dynamics, 1986] for viscous dispersions of rigid rods, extended to semi-flexibility [A. R. Khokhlov and A. N. Semenov, Macromolecules, 17 (1984), pp. 2678-2685], and for Rouse flexible chains to model the hydrodynamics of polymer nano-rod
composites (PNCs). A mean-field potential for the polymer-rod interface provides the
key coupling between the two phases. We restrict this first study to two-dimensional
conformational space. We solve the coupled set of Smoluchowski equations for three
benchmark experiments. First we explore how rod semi-flexibility and the polymerrod
interface alter the Onsager equilibrium phase diagram. Then we determine monodomain
phase behavior of PNCs for imposed simple elongation and shear, respectively.
These results inform the effects that each phase has on the other as parametric
strengths of the interactions are varied in the context of the most basic rheological experiments.</p>