In this project we are interested in identifying the viscoelastic properties of “living” polymer networks. Such structures are also known as reversible polymer networks. Because the bond energy of the junction points in this type of network is comparable in magnitude with the thermal energy (kT) of the system, a quantifiable number of bonds have a high probability of breaking and reforming on the time scale of the experiment.

Our study will show how this type of bonding modifies the viscoelastic behavior of the tetravalent networks and the trivalent networks. The technique of investigation used, includes molecular dynamics (MD) – Monte Carlo (MC) calculations for data collection and the time-space correlation formalism for data analysis. In order to visualize the results of the computations, we adapted Geomview, a popular 3D geometry program.

                                                        (Click for large picture)

                         
 

The picture above is a snapshot simulation of a tetravalent reversible network comprising of a total number of 4000 junctions. The simulation box on the left displays only the junction points having lost one of its bonded strands due to the thermal fluctuations of the system.