MATERIALS SCIENCE AND CHEMISTRY

Polymer based composites are indispensable in our modern world. We trust our life to them in high-technology applications like airplane wings and in everyday technology like car tires. Mixing a hard solid and a polymer is done to improve selected properties, most often the mechanical ones. Profs. Paul and Binder and their team at the Universities of Halle-Wittenberg and Mainz study a melt of 1,4-polybutadiene (employed in car tires) close to a graphite interface on the HPC systems of GCS using chemically realistic Molecular Dynamics simulations. This yields molecular insight into the structure and dynamics of melt chains close to the surface (trains :red, loops: green, tails: blue) and the resulting property changes of the composite.