One of the essential features of solid-like polymeric material is their mechanical durability under repeated loading. They undergo irreversible structural changes in response to cyclic deformations with small to moderate amplitudes. Yet, after many cycles their dynamics can become periodic and they seem to remember their mechanical history. This project aims at combining molecular simulations and statistical physics tools to characterize the microstructural changes under cyclic tensile deformation and to discover the conditions under which we can encode and read out a mechanical memory in glassy and semicrystalline polymers.
References:
S. Jabbari-Farouji, et al., ACS Macro Letters 4 (2), 147-150 (2015).
D. Fiocco, G. Fo, and S. Sastry, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 025702 (2014).