Grained Models of the Bead-Spring Type

Coarse-Grained Models of the Bead-Spring Type 

These models retain the form of the nonbonded interaction used in the chemically realistic modeling, i.e., they use either an interaction of the Lennard-Jones or of the exponential-6 type. The repulsive parts of these potentials generate the necessary local excluded volume, whereas the attractive long-range parts can be used to model varying solvent quality for dilute or semi-dilute solutions and to generate a reasonable equation-of-state behavior for polymeric melts. 

The inclusion of chain connectivity prevents polymer strands from crossing one another in the course of a computer simulation. In bead-spring polymer models, this typically means that one has to limit the maximal (or typical) extension of a spring connecting the beads that represent the monomers along the chain. This process is most often performed using the so-called finitely extensible, nonlinear elastic (FENE) type potentials44 of Eq. [17] 

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