Influence of Nanoparticle Additives on the Fragility of Polymer Glass Formation and the Buchenau Relation

2009/06/29 by Francis W. Starr, Jack F. Douglas, Starr, Francis W. +1
Chemistry · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Adsorption, diffusion, and thermodynamic properties of materials #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Theoretical and Computational Physics

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0906.5275

openalex publication_date 2009/06/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We investigate the impact of the addition of nanoparticles (NP) on the fragility of a model glass-forming polymer melt by molecular dynamics simulations. We find significant changes in fragility for nanoparticle volume fractions ϕ exceeding ≈ 5%, where fragility changes correlate with the inverse variance of the magnitude of the Debye-Waller factor , a measure of local "stiffness" fluctuations. We also confirm the validity of the Buchenau relationship between and the structural relaxation time τ for all ϕ and polymer-NP interaction types.

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