Entanglement kinetics in polymer melts are chemically specific

Abstract

We investigate the universality of entanglement kinetics in polymer melts. We compare predictions of a recently developed constitutive equation for disentanglement to molecular dynamics simulations of both united-atom polyethylene and Kremer-Grest models for polymers in shear and extensional flow. We confirm that entanglements recover on the retraction timescale, rather than the reptation timescale. We find that the convective constraint release parameter $\beta$ is independent of molecular weight, but that it increases with the ratio of Kuhn length $b_K$ to packing length $p$ as $\beta\sim (b_K/p)^\alpha$, with an exponent $\alpha=1.9$, which may suggest that disentanglement rate correlates with an increase in the tube diameter. These results may help shed light on which polymers are more likely to undergo shear banding.