Fast and accurate closure approximations for bead-spring models of dilute polymer solutions

Abstract

Dilute polymer solutions, besides being widely used in the chemical industry, are used to understand the physical processes that govern the dynamics of isolated macromolecules in solution. Several recent studies used Brownian dynamics simulations of mesoscale bead-spring chain models to demonstrate that the finite extensibility of polymer chains and the existence of fluctuating hydrodynamic interactions between different parts of the chains play a key role in determining the behaviour of polymer solutions in strong flows. Three closure approximations which incorporate these phenomena are presented which offer considerable gains in computational efficiency. The predictions of these approximate models are in good agreement with the results of simulations in strong extensional flows.