Preparation of bulk melt chain configurations of polycyclic polymers

Abstract

The configurations of oligomers of polyimide and polyetherketone polycyclic polymers in the melt are predicted by a new hybrid pivot Monte Carlo (PMC)/molecular dynamics (MD) single-chain sampling technique restricted to a limited number of near-neighbor interactions. These are then compared to configurations obtained for the same models by running MD simulations on the corresponding multichain systems in the bulk melt. A new phantom-atom technique is introduced which avoids interlocking rings during construction of the bulk melt samples. Similar to earlier work carried out on polyethylene, polyvinylchloride and uncharged polyethylene oxide, both theoretical and bulk melt sampled conformational and configurational properties are found to be in very good agreement. This confirms that the new hybrid PMC/MD sampling is a promising and cost-effective technique for preparing polymer samples prior to subsequent MD simulations of the bulk amorphous phase.