Research on Simulation Methods for Depolymerization of Polystyrene

To verify the possibility to simulate depolymerization, simulations of the depolymerization of polystyrene were performed. Molecular Dynamics simulations (MD) using neural network potentials were found to be similar in accuracy to MD using density functional theory calculations. It was also found that long-time simulations using neural network potential-MD predicted styrene monomer yields close to those obtained experimentally, and that the monomer yields tended to decrease with increasing pressure.