FINITELY EXTENSIBLE BEAD SPRING CHAIN MACROMOLECULES IN STEADY ELONGATIONAL FLOWS

Infinitely dilute polymer solutions undergoing elongational flows are studied by modeling the polymer molecules as bead-spring chains. Monte Carlo integration is used to calculate the properties of chains of finitely extensible nonlinear elastic springs in steady uniaxial elongational flow from the exact solution for the distribution of configurations. The properties calculated include the mean square end-to-end distance of the chains and the elongational viscosity and intrinsic birefringence of the solution. These properties are compared to the predictions of the model under the Peterlin approximation. Whereas the models with and without the approximation show qualitatively similar results, there are substantial quantitative differences.