Molecular dynamics simulations of crystal nucleation in entangled polymer melts under start-up shear conditions

Understanding the flow induced crystallisation process is necessary due to its technological relevance to polymer processing. Polymer crystallisation controls the morphology of semi-crystalline polymers and hence the properties of the end product. We perform molecular dynamics simulations of polymer melts consisting of sufficiently entangled linear chains under shear flow. We determine the Rouse relaxation time (τ_R) for linear polymer chains using an established rheological model at different temperatures and fit the simulation data with the Arrhenius and Williams-Landel-Ferry equations. We simulate the crystallisation induction times for different values of the Rouse-Weissenberg number (W_iR=γ̇τ_R) at different temperatures. We observe that the level of strain and stretch required to induce crystallisation increases with temperature. We find that the induction times follow a power law in shear rate and observe a more pronounced effect of flow rate for higher temperatures than at lower temperatures. Moreover, we determine that nucleation events occur relatively early in the shear transient and at a stretch value that is smaller than its steady state value. We also report the values of strain at which the occurrence of a nucleation event is most likely to happen.