This document presents a new method for analyzing crystallinity in polyethylene (PE) molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The method discretizes the simulation volume into smaller statistical volume elements (SVEs) and calculates a "crystalline degree" for each SVE based on a 2-point autocorrelation of monomer positions, accounting for spatial relationships between monomers. Results show the new crystalline degree metric captures crystallinity evolution with increasing strain similarly to traditional density and Herman's orientation measures. Future work will investigate pair correlations and develop structure-processing relationships for local PE crystallinity.
2. Background and Motivation
● Crystallinity affects bulk polymer morphology and
mechanical properties
o The phenomena of crystallinity occurs with
interactions at the molecular level
● Processing conditions alter crystalline
development
o quench rates, deformation rate, temperature
● Polyethylene crystallinity defined by specific
arrangement of monomers in unit cell
Polystyrene
http://www.nationalboard.org/
http://neon.mems.cmu.edu/cramb/27-
100/lab/S00_lab2/lab2.html
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3. Problem Statement
● Current analysis techniques do not
account for spatial relationships between
monomers
o Density and Herman’s Orientation
● Develop a new analysis technique to
measure local crystallinity in PE-MD
simulations accounting for these spatial
relationships
http://www.doitpoms.ac.uk/tlplib/poly
merbasics/images/Crystallinity.gif
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4. The entire simulation
volume is called the
representative volume
element (RVE)
The discretized
cells are called
statistical volume
elements (SVEs)
Splitting Into SVEs
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5. Density
● Traditional measure of
morphology
● Accuracy issues with fine
discretization
Strain = 0.1
Temperature = 375K
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6. Herman’s Orientation
● Measure of the
orientation of a chosen
axis to a reference axis
Strain = 0.1
Temperature = 375K
θ
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7. Crystalline
Degree
To calculate crystalline degree (C°):
1. Represent monomers in SVE
as voxelized spheres
2. Perform 2-pt autocorrelation
(non-periodic) on monomers
3. Find number of vectors in
autocorrelation which exceed
0.01 probability threshold
4. Normalize by maximum
expected number of vectors
exceeding 0.01 threshold for
perfect PE crystals
amorphous semicrystalline perfect crystal
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8. Crystallinity Analysis Results
Mass Density = ρ, Herman’s Orientation = θ, Crystalline Degree = C°
● 0.6 Threshold for
crystallinity for θ
from literature
● 0.4 Threshold for
C° chosen from
C° histogram
● By inspection,
thresholds on C°
and θ closely
match
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Density Herman’s Crystalline Degree
9. Measure Evolution with Strain
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vi2cn82ritqumyi/amorphous_4strain_10e9-erate.mpg?dl=0
● Herman’s orientation
increases most with
increasing strain
○ Due to alignment of
amorphous chains
● Density stays mostly
constant
● Crystalline Degree
increases slightly
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engineering strain
10. Future Work
● Investigation into pair-correlations
for crystallinity analysis
● Development of processing-
structure linkages for local PE
crystallinity
● Officially release the analysis
tools for PE-MD simulations on
Github
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11. Collaborative Interactions
External Tools and Codes
● SpatialStatsFFT.m code for non-periodic 2-pt statistics - Dr. Tony Fast,
GaTech
● Nanohub.org, Polymer Builder Tool - Benjamin Haley, Purdue Nano
Collaboration Network (NCN) project
● Amorphous Polymer Generator LAMMPS script - Mark Tschopp, Cooperative
Computing Group at Mississippi State University
Thank You’s
● Trial PE-MD simulations and LAMMPS assistance from Xin Dong
● Consultation with Prof. Karl Jacob for PE-MD expertise, with Prof. Surya
Kalidindi for data science expertise and Dr. Tony Fast for coding expertise
● ME8883 classmates for countless beneficial interactions in-class and online
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12. References
● Dong, X. McDowell, DL. Kalidindi, SR. & Jacob, K. (2014). Polymer, 55, 4248–4257.
● Haley, BP, et. al. (2014), "Polymer Modeler" https://nanohub.org/resources/polymod.
● Hossain, D., et. al. Polymer, 2010, 51(25), 6071–6083.
● Ko, M. J., Waheed, N., Lavine, M. S., & Rutledge, G. C. (2004). The Journal of Chemical
Physics, 121(6), 2823-2832.
● Niezgoda, S. R., Fullwood, D. T., & Kalidindi, S. R. (2008). Acta Materialia, 56(18), 5285–5292.
● Pant, P. V. K., Han, J., Smith, G. D., & Boyd, R. H. (1993). 99(1), 597–604.
Questions?
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-The spatial relationships have will contain within them info about crystalline perfection, chain conformation,
-Crystallinity can affect hardness, tensile strength and modulus, melting point, etc.
-MD simulations are necessary to capture the effects of polymer crystallinity and understand how processing conditions will affect its nucleation.
-In our case bi-axial and uniaxial stretching simulate a processing condition.
-local crystallinity could be very important in recognizing transition, mesophase, regions which are not amorphous nor crystalline. This new measure could provide a way to capture this information. As we see later density contains high variance at small voxel size. Our measure is still accurate, perhaps giving a way to determine nucleation and growth sites/directions based on various processing conditions.
-For amorphous simulation the order parameter increases, thus there is more noise and it becomes hard to threshold what is amorphous and what is crystalline.
Polymer MD simulations with united atom
talk about how at each timestep the we have monomer locations
monomers form chains
split up the simulation volume into spatial cells of a predetermined size
talk about PE crystallinity
talk about crystalline/amorphous examples
in each cell we want to know if it is amorphous or crystalline or somewhere in-between
crystalline regions have higher density and amorphous regions are lower.
talk about how the size of the SVE impacts the accuracy of determination
-Create animation where the two vectors come together and the angle between them is shown, highlight the fact that Herman’s is a measure of order, not of crystallinity
-say that herman’s ranges from -½ for perfect amorphous to 1 for perfect crystalline
-basically discuss how we measured herman’s with the every other monomer vectors
covalent radius of the united atom PE monomer
Walk through how Crystalline Degree is calculated
Talk about the final step of thresholding the various measures to get a crystallinity map
Talk about the high degree of alignment between the crystallinity analysis techniques
Mention what this data is and where it comes from
collaboration with Xin from Dr. Jacob’s lab
Crystalline Degree Threshold : 0.4, Density Threshold : 0.862
talk about how the autocorrelations change with increasing strain level depending on which crystallinity analysis is utilized
at high-strain the Herman’s Orientation increases more than crystalline degree
talk about how microstructure function is formulated
we have monomer locations in each cell
monomers are given some radius - talk about how this radius is chosen
monomer material represented by 1s in 3D array the shape of the cell
explain what the 2pt autocorrelation means in this case
cite Tony’s spatialstatsfft code
talk about how spatial cells with varying crystallinity show peaks at similar locations after the threshold in the autocorrelation
threshold is applied by taking vectors with a probability exceeding some threshold as 1 and all others as 0
talk about how the autocorrelations change with increasing strain level depending on which crystallinity analysis is utilized
at high-strain the Herman’s Orientation increases more than crystalline degree