HBP Builder: A Tool to Generate Hyperbranched Polymers and Hyperbranched Multi-Arm Copolymers for Coarse-grained and Fully Atomistic Molecular Simulations

Abstract

Computer simulation has been becoming a versatile tool that can investigate detailed information from the microscopic scale to the mesoscopic scale. However, the crucial first step of molecular simulation is model building, particularly for hyperbranched polymers (HBPs) and hyperbranched multi-arm copolymers (HBMCs) with complex and various topological structures. Unlike well-defined polymers, not only the molar weight of HBPs/HBMCs with polydispersity, but the HBPs/HBMCs with the same degree of polymerization (DP) and degree of branching (DB) also have many possible topological structures, thus making difficulties for user to build model in molecular simulation. In order to build a bridge between model building and molecular simulation of HBPs and HBMCs, we developed HBP Builder, a C language open source HBPs/HBMCs building toolkit. HBP Builder implements an automated protocol to build various coarse-grained and fully atomistic structures of HBPs/HBMCs according to usera s specific requirements. Meanwhile, coarse-grained and fully atomistic output structures can be directly employed in popular simulation packages, including HOOMD, Tinker and Gromacs. Moreover, HBP Builder has an easy-to-use graphical user interface and the modular architecture, making it easy to extend and reuse it as a part of other program.