Direct Equilibration and Characterization of Polymer Melts for Computer Simulations

Topological constraints due to chain connectivity and uncrossability greatly impact the long time dynamics and rheology of high molecular weight polymer melts. Computer simulations to study properties of such melts are very advantageous, since perfect control of molecular conformation and melt morphology is available. We present a methodology to prepare well-equilibrated polymer melts which only requires local relaxation. The approach efficiently leads to equilibrated ensembles of bead-spring polymer melts of 1 000 chains of up to 2 000 beads, which correspond to 24 (fully flexible) and 45 entanglement lengths (semi-flexible chains). Entanglements are identified by a primitive path analysis and a master curve of the entanglement lengths for different chain and persistence lengths is presented.