Dissipative particle dynamics advantages

The imderlying model in dissipative particle dynamics is usually developed in such a way that the mass, length and timescales are all unity. This is similar to the use of reduced units for the Lennard-Jones potential (Section 4.10.5). A particular advantage of such an approach is that a single simulation may often be able to explain the behaviour of many different systems. With a mass of 1 the force acting on a particle is equal to its acceleration. In DPD there are three forces on each bead [Groot and Warren 1997] ... 

The crucial advantage of Dissipative Particle Dynamics is the correspondence to the Gibbs Canonical NVT ensemble. It can be shown that the system evolves to a steady state by a suitable choice of the relative magnitudes of the forces acting on the particles. 

In between the molecular and macroscopic approach several mesoscopic scale techniques are available, like lattice bond fluctuation models [15] and coarse grained techniques, such as smoothed particle hydrody-namics[16], and dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) [17, 18]. The latter is based on the concept of matter particles , representing a large number of atoms or molecules, interacting via soft potentials and subjected to dissipative and fluctuating forces. Polymeric system can be described by simple bead-spring models, with the advantage that a full chain can be represented by just a few particles, typically from 20 to 50 [18, 19]. 

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