Mobility of Polymer Melts in a Regular Array of Carbon Nanotubes

In polymer nanocomposites, mechanical properties essentially depend on the alignment of nanoparticles and polymers. In this work, we investigate an entangled polymer melt in a confinement computationally, in order to get an insight into the mobility behavior of the polymer chains. The confinement consists of nanotubes, arranged in a hexagonal array. We use dissipative particle dynamics, a fast, soft-core simulation method, and reintroduce entanglement dynamics via slip-springs. We observe a distinct influence of the confinement as diffusion is increased in the direction parallel to the nanotubes. Furthermore, we observe that an orientation of the polymers parallel to the nanotubes and chains are compressed in the direction orthogonal to their primitive path. The diffusion parallel to the nanotubes increases further as we increase the nanotube volume fraction in our systems. Moreover, we investigate the slip-spring distribution in the proximity of the nanotube surfaces of our fast and simple slip-spring model, which we find to coincide with results reported for more sophisticated and expensive methods. Our DPD model shows potential applicability to a wide range of polymer nanocomposites while preserving reptation behavior, which is typically lost due to the use of soft-core models.