Predicting Solute Diffusivity in Polymers Using Time–Temperature Superposition

We demonstrate a novel application of the time–temperature superposition (TTS) principle to predict solute diffusivity D in glassy polymers using atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. Our TTS approach incorporates the Debye–Waller factor ⟨u2⟩, a measure of solute caging, along with concepts from thermodynamic scaling methods, allowing us to balance contributions to the dynamics from temperature and ⟨u2⟩ using adjustable parameters. Our approach rescales the solute mean-squared displacement curves at several temperatures into a master curve that approximates the diffusive dynamics at a reference temperature, effectively extending the simulation time scale from nanoseconds to seconds and beyond. With a set of "universal" parameters, this TTS approach predicts D with reasonable accuracy in a broad range of polymer/solute systems. Using TTS greatly reduces the computational cost compared to standard MD simulations. Thus, our method offers a means to rapidly and routinely provide order-of-magnitude estimates of D using simulations.