[PO-O1] Poster Session 1

[P1-76] Atomistic modeling of polymer friction

^○Robin Sam Vacher (SINTEF-NTNU, Norway)

Polymers are present in our daily life and we are using their tribological properties even without noticing it, walking with shoes is just one example. However, the theoretical understanding of the friction and wear of polymers is still lacking and therefore, development of novel low friction material of solid polymers can only be achieved by trial and error procedures including expensive testing. In this work, the focus is put on the influence of structural properties of solid polymers on the friction and wear. Molecular dynamic simulation is used to capture the crystallization process of PolyVinyl Alcohol (PVA). The coarse grain potential for PVA (CG-PVA) developed by Meyer and Muller-Plathe (”Formation of chain-folded structures in supercooled polymer melts”, J. Chem. Phys. 2001, 115, 7807) has been used in order to drastically speed up the simulation. Depending on the cooling rate and the number of monomers per chain, the crystalline domains will have different structural properties (eg. crystallinity level). We create samples of polymers with different crystalline structure, and investigate numerically by simulating the effect of rubbing the surface with an AFM tip the relation between friction, wear, and crystallinity.

Keywords : molecular dynamic, polymers, friction and wear