https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2016-60096-8
Regular Article
A hybrid particle-continuum resolution method and its application to a homopolymer solution
1 Institut für Physik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 55099 Mainz, Germany
2 KITPC, Zhong Guan Cun East Street 55, PO Box 2735, Beijing 100190, P.R. China
3 CUI, Universität Hamburg, Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761 Hamburg, Germany
4 Institut für Mathematik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 55099 Mainz, Germany
a e-mail: qish@uni-mainz.de
Received: 31 March 2016
Revised: 19 June 2016
Published online: 18 July 2016
We discuss in detail a recently proposed hybrid particle-continuum scheme for complex fluids and evaluate it at the example of a confined homopolymer solution in slit geometry. The hybrid scheme treats polymer chains near the impenetrable walls as particles keeping the configuration details, and chains in the bulk region as continuous density fields. Polymers can switch resolutions on the fly, controlled by an inhomogeneous tuning function. By properly choosing the tuning function, the representation of the system can be adjusted to reach an optimal balance between physical accuracy and computational efficiency. The hybrid simulation reproduces the results of a reference particle simulation and is significantly faster (about a factor of 3.5 in our application example).
© EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag, 2016
