Understanding and modeling polymers: The challenge of multiple scales

TL;DR

This paper reviews multiscale modeling techniques for polymers, highlighting the complexity of their multilevel interactions and discussing strategies to bridge different scales, while identifying unresolved challenges for comprehensive understanding.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing multiscale models and bridging strategies for polymers, emphasizing current challenges and future research directions.

Findings

Review of popular polymer models across scales

Discussion of static and dynamic coarse-graining methods

Identification of unresolved multiscale modeling challenges

Abstract

Polymer materials have the characteristic feature that they are multiscale systems by definition. Already the description of a single molecules involves a multitude of different scales, and cooperative processes in polymer assemblies are governed by the interplay of these scales. Polymers have been among the first materials for which systematic multiscale techniques were developed, yet they continue to present extraordinary challenges for modellers. In this perspective, we review popular models that are used to describe polymers on different scales and discuss scale bridging strategies such as static and dynamic coarse-graining methods and multiresolution approaches. We close with a list of hard problems which still need to be solved in order to gain a comprehensive quantitative understanding of polymer systems on all scales.