Witold Brostow(*,a), Antonio M. Cunha(b) and Ricardo Simoes(a,b)

(a) Department of Materials Science, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-5310, USA; and Department of Physics, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203, USA; brostow@unt.edu
(b) Department of Polymer Engineering, University of Minho, 4800, Guimaraes, Portugal; amcunha@dep.uminho.pt

ABSTRACT

Our simulations of mechanical and tribological behavior of polymeric materials rely on the creation of realistic materials on a computer. They follow previous work with one- and two-phase two-dimensional materials [9-11]. We now report a procedure of creation of three-dimensional polymers. Related issues are those of characterization in terms of the average chain length and the average end-to-end distance and also of visualization of the structures before, during and after a tribological or mechanical simulated "experiment".