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Modelling the viscoelasticity of polymer-based nanocomposites guided by<br/>principles of non-equilibrium thermodynamics

Objective

By appropriately adding nanoparticles to a polymer matrix can lead to materials with dramatically improved properties, especially under conditions of good dispersion. From a rheological point of view, polymer nanocomposites are typically considered to be soft colloidal dispersions, with an intrinsically disordered structure that greatly affects their viscoelastic or mechanical properties. Despite that the rheological properties of nanocomposites in the melt can be predicted or explained via entanglement network simulations based on multiscale simulation strategies, large-scale macroscopic calculations of their processing flows requires reliable constitutive (viscoelastic) equations which are currently missing. Our objective in the proposed project is to develop such constitutive models guided by principles of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. In particular, we propose to develop a new family of differential models capable of describing the complicated rheological
behavior of polymer nanocomposites as a function of the viscoelastic properties of the native polymer matrix and a few parameters describing polymer-filler interactions. The new models will be thermodynamically admissible and will be validated against experimentally measured data for the linear and non-linear viscoelastic properties of selected systems. They will also be employed in large scale finite- or spectral-element calculations in flows such as extrusion and calendering. The outcome of our work will be new differential constitutive equations capable of explaining or describing a number of intricate phenomena typically observed in the preparation and processing of polymer-matrix
nanocomposites: filler alignment for anisotropic fillers, particle clustering, network formation, jamming etc., and their effect on the observed rheological properties (yield stress, stress overshoot, etc.)

Call for proposal

FP7-PEOPLE-2011-CIG
See other projects for this call

Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS
EU contribution
€ 75 000,00
Address
AVENUE PANEPISTIMIOU 2109 AGLANTZI
1678 Nicosia
Cyprus

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Region
Κύπρος Κύπρος Κύπρος
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Administrative Contact
Georgios Georgiou (Dr.)
Links
Total cost
No data