Pressure effects on the dynamics of semiflexible polymer melts

An increase in pressure increases the density in the local environment of chain segments and therefore reduces segmental mobility. In melts of flexible polymer chains, chain conformations are little affected by an increase in pressure and, thus, the chain mobility decreases with the segmental mobility. In melts of semiflexible chains, on the other hand, an increase in pressure affects both the local environment and the chain conformations since packing effects lead to an increase in orientational order. In this work, we investigate the effect of pressure on the segmental and chain dynamics of semiflexible polymer melts with Monte Carlo simulations of a bond-fluctuation lattice model. Simulation results for short chains (to avoid entanglement effects) for a range of temperature and pressures are presented and analyzed to reveal the correlation between conformational and dynamic properties of the chains.