Temperature Transferable and Thermodynamically Consistent Coarse-Grained Model for Binary Polymer Systems

For the simulations of polymer systems, coarse-grained (CG) models are often developed to tackle the length and time scale limitations that are not feasible by all-atom molecular dynamic simulations. However, due to the necessary simplification or reduction in atomistic degrees of freedom, CG models usually have poor transferability over various temperatures, compositions, or thermodynamic states. In this work, the structure-based iterative Boltzmann inversion (IBI) method is further developed to obtain temperature transferable and thermodynamically consistent CG potentials for binary polymer systems. In particular, the conventional IBI procedure is first utilized to optimize single-component CG potentials from homopolymer systems while cross-interaction potentials from a random block copolymer system. Afterward, a thermodynamic integration method is applied to refine the cross-interaction potential between two constituent components in binary systems until the Flory–Huggins parameter (χ) between two components is matched with experimental value. We apply the above optimization procedure for the polystyrene-block-poly(methyl methacrylate) (PS-b-PMMA) as an example, which is widely studied experimentally, and the χ value can be easily obtained in the literature. To validate the transferability of the obtained CG potential, systems of both PS and PMMA homopolymers, random block copolymers, diblock copolymers, and PS/PMMA blends with various compositions are simulated. Many properties, including the mass density, radius distribution function, and bonded distribution functions, between CG beads generated from CG simulations match very well with those from atomistic simulations in the simulated temperature range, i.e., from 453 to 500 K. More importantly, phase morphologies of diblock copolymers and phase diagram of PS/PMMA binary blends over wide temperature and compositional ranges generated from CG simulations using our model are in good agreement with experimental results and predictions from self-consistent field theory.