Polymer chain generation for coarse-grained models using radical-like polymerization

An innovative method is proposed to generate configurations of coarse grained models for polymer melts. This method, largely inspired by chemical ``radical polymerization'', is divided in three stages: (i) nucleation of radicals (reacting molecules caching monomers); (ii) growth of chains within a solvent of monomers; (iii) termination: annihilation of radicals and removal of residual monomers. The main interest of this method is that relaxation is performed as chains are generated. Pure mono and poly-disperse polymers melts are generated and compared to the configurations generated by the Push Off method from Auhl et al.. A detailed study of the static properties (gyration radius, mean square internal distance, entanglement length) confirms that the radical-like polymerization technics is suitable to generate equilibrated melts. The method is flexible, and can be adapted to generate nano-structured polymers, namely diblock and triblock copolymers.