Contribution of covalent bond force to pressure in polymer melts

Abstract

Molecular dynamics simulations of the freely jointed effective hard sphere model of a polymer melt are performed, with continuous covalent and noncovalent potentials employed for computational convenience. The virial theorem is used to determine the melt pressure from the simulations. Excellent agreement is found over a wide range of density and degree of polymerization with the recently introduced equation of state of Honnell and Hall. The atomic pressure is defined as the contribution made by each atom to the compressibility factor of the system; it is found to be uniform along the interior atoms of the polymer chain, with slightly different values for the end atoms. This uniform value is almost independent of N, the number of bonds in the chain, and explains the small dependence on N of the pressure that is observed. Particular attention is paid to the contribution to the pressure made by the force in the covalent bonds of the system. For packing fractions greater than 0.3, approximately 30% of the pressure in the melt arises from this source.