A hybrid particle-continuum resolution method and its application to a homopolymer solution

TL;DR

This paper presents a hybrid particle-continuum simulation method for complex fluids, applied to a homopolymer solution, achieving a good balance between accuracy and computational speed.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible hybrid scheme that allows polymers to switch between particle and continuum representations dynamically.

Findings

Reproduces reference particle simulation results accurately.

Achieves approximately 3.5 times faster computation.

Effectively balances physical detail and efficiency.

Abstract

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).