Cooling rate dependence of the glass transition temperature of polymer melts: Molecular dynamics study

A coarse-grained bead spring model of short polymer chains is studied by constant pressure molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Due to two competing length scales for the length of effective bonds and the energetically preferred distance between nonbonded beads, one observes a glass transition when dense melts are cooled down (as shown in previous work, at a pressure p=1 the mode coupling critical temperature is at Tc≈0.45 and the Vogel–Fulcher temperature is T0≈0.33, in Lennard-Jones units). The present work extends these studies, estimating a cooling-rate-dependent glass transition temperature Tg(Γ) by cooling the model system from T=0.6 down to T=0.3, applying cooling rates from Γ≈10−3 to Γ≈10−6 (in MD time units), and attempting to identify Tg(Γ) from a kink in the volume versus temperature or potential energy versus temperature curves. It is found that Tg(Γ) lies in the range 0.43⩽Tg(Γ)⩽0.47, for the cooling rates quoted, and the variation of Tg(Γ) for Γ is compatible with the expected logarithmic variations. We will show why a detailed distinction between competing theories on these cooling rate effects would need an excessive amount of computer time. To estimate also the melting transition temperature Tm of this model, the sytem was prepared in a crystalline configuration as an initial state and heated up. The onset of diffusion, accompanied by an isotropization of the pressure tensor was observed for Tm≈0.77. This implies that the model is suitable for studying deeply supercooled melts.