Molecular modelling of entangled polymer fluids under flow The ...

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to my supervisors, Tom McLeish and Oliver Harlen, for their
help, support and guidance throughout my PhD. I have benefited greatly from their
supervision. I also owe a large debt of gratitude to Alexei Likhtman with whom I have
been collaborating for the last three years. I have learnt a considerable amount about,
not only polymer dynamics, but research methodology from Alexei and the standard
of my research has been considerably enhanced by Alexei’s influence.
I would also like to thank Richard Blackwell for answering many of my questions
about tube theory, particularly for branched polymers and for helping me to understand
the tube model in the early part of my PhD. I am grateful to Peter Olmsted for general
guidance during my PhD and for agreeing to act as my internal examiner. Thanks
to Daniel Read for helping me attain greater appreciation of my work through his
questioning and insightful suggestions.
I also appreciate useful discussions with numerous researchers during my time at
the KITP at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In particular I am grateful
to Scott Milner and Ron Larson for guidance during this time. I would like to thank
Professor Marrucci and Giovanni Ianniruberto for taking the time to look over my work.
I am also grateful to Professor Marrucci for agreeing to act as external examiner.
Thanks to Suneel for providing experimental rheology on melt1810Hb and collaborating
with me during the analysis of these data. I am also grateful to David Venerus
for kindly supplying his rheological data on both a model entangled linear solution and
an industrial branched melt, both sets of data were particularly helpful in the development
of this work. Thanks to Jens Hepperle for providing his blend data and for
spending time discussing his work during his visit to Leeds and to Akanari Minegishi
for kindly providing his blend data.
I would also like to acknowledge all of the people involved in the µPP project. My
involvement in this project has been useful in my development as a researcher. In
particular, thanks to Timothy Nicholson for running this project. I also acknowledge
Nat Inkson for help with the multimode pom-pom model.
Thanks to Maureen Thompson and Beverly Robinson for help and support during
my time at Leeds and to all other friends and colleagues at Leeds, particularly Anna
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