Abstract
Many military and industry applications increasingly require advanced materials that are able to simultaneous carry high load (stiffness) and dissipate energy upon impact (damping). Polymer nanocomposites are potentially excellent candidates for these applications since they offer tunability via advancements in nanoscale processing technology (e.g. layer-by-layer deposition). Understanding mechanisms for the simultaneous increase of stiffness and damping in polymer nanocomposites involves characterization of interactions at surfaces between nanoscale constituents and molecular-scale processes including the role of interphase regions and polymer ordering. This information is exceedingly difficult to obtain experimentally due to the small length and time scales and disorder of the system. Here, we perform molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to understand stress and strain heterogeneity responsible for increases in stiffness and dissipation on the nanoscale in a model polymer nanocomposite. We compute local stress and strain fluctuations at polymer-nanoparticle interfaces and identify polymer chain slippage as one of the mechanisms for energy dissipation.
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Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by DARPA under Contract No. HR0011-10-C-0192. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressly or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or the U.S. Government. Authors are thankful for useful discussions with Dr. Trisha Sain, Prof. Ellen Arruda, Dr. Bongjun Yeom, Prof. Tony Waas, and Prof. Nicholas Kotov of University of Michigan.
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© 2013 The Society for Experimental Mechanics
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Lacevic, N.M., Joshi, S.P. (2013). Energy Dissipation Mechanism in Nanocomposites Studied via Molecular Dynamics Simulation. In: Antoun, B., Qi, H., Hall, R., Tandon, G., Lu, H., Lu, C. (eds) Challenges in Mechanics of Time-Dependent Materials and Processes in Conventional and Multifunctional Materials, Volume 2. Conference Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Mechanics Series. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4241-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4241-7_4
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