Atomistic Insights on the Rheological Property of Polycaprolactone Composites with the Addition of Graphene

Abstract To facilitate the biomedical applications of biocomposites, researchers have used different types of fillers to enhance their mechanical properties. However, the addition of fillers not only changes the mechanical performance of the biocomposites, but also affects their printability, that is, their rheological properties. With the aid of atomistic simulations, this work investigates the influence of graphene size and aggregation on the rheological properties of polycaprolactone (PCL) composites. For the same weight ratio, increasing the graphene size causes the viscosity of the PCL composite to increase until a threshold edge length equal to PCL's average radius of gyration. After this threshold value, the viscosity decreases with increasing edge length. The PCL composite with multilayered graphene exhibits a lower viscosity compared with its counterpart with monolayer graphene. Specifically, the addition of graphene is shown to augment the shear‐thinning effect. The findings in this work provide a fundamental understanding of the rheological property of PCL composites with the addition of 2D nanofillers, which shed light on the ink design for bioprinting.