Thursday, 30 June 2016

Strong memory of strain-induced copolymer crystallization as revealed by Monte Carlo simulations

Published Date

19 August 2016, Vol.98:282–286, doi:10.1016/j.polymer.2016.06.040

Title

Strong memory of strain-induced copolymer crystallization as revealed by Monte Carlo simulations

Author

Xinchao Guan^a

Huanhuan Gao^a

Liyun Zha^a

Yixian Wu^b

Wenbing Hu^a,^,

aState Key Lab of Coordination Chemistry, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China
bState Key Laboratory of Chemical Resource Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, 100029, China

Received 13 January 2016. Revised 28 May 2016. Accepted 15 June 2016. Available online 16 June 2016.

Highlights

•
We first-time observed strong memory of strain-induced copolymer crystallization.
•
We evidenced the mechanism of strong memory similar to heating-cooling cycles.
•
We developed a simulation approach to study the cyclic loading of network polymers.

Abstract

We performed dynamic Monte Carlo simulations of strain-induced crystallization of homopolymer and random copolymers under cyclic loading of strains. We found that since the second loading random copolymers shift down the onset strain of crystallization and raise up the crystallinity, in contrast to homopolymer. We attributed the strong memory to the remaining of sequence-length segregation raised by copolymer crystallization during the first loading of strains. The mechanism is consistent with that for the strong memory of copolymer crystallization under cyclic cooling, as revealed by previous experiments and simulations. Our results showed a new effect of chain-sequence defects on the cyclic loading performance of rubbers.