Plateau moduli of Kremer–Grest models for commodity polymer melts

Abstract

We estimate the plateau moduli of end-pinned bead-spring polymer melts with Z = 100 and Z = 200 entanglements per chain from the time-dependent elastic response to a step strain, which we first extrapolate to infinite time and then interpolate to zero strain. We present data for systems deformed in the melt state and for systems deformed at the primitive path level following the recent inverse primitive path analysis protocol. We observe excellent agreement between the plateau moduli obtained via the two deformation protocols and good agreement with the available experimental data for commodity polymer melts using a common mapping on the Kuhn scale.