Ordering and Reverse Ordering Mechanisms of Triblock Copolymers in the Presence of Solvent
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Date
2009-02-27
Authors
Thompson, Russell B.
Rasmussen, Kim
Maniadis, Panagiotis
Kober, Edward M.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
MDPI
Abstract
Self-consistent field theory is used to study the self-assembly of a triblock copolymer melt. Two different external factors (temperature and solvent) are shown to affect the self-assembly. Either one or two-step self-assembly can be found as a function of temperature in the case of a neat triblock melt, or as a function of increasing solvent content (for non-selective solvents) in the case of a triblock-solvent mixture. For selective solvents, it is shown that increasing the solvent content leads to more complicated self-assembly mechanisms, including a reversed transition where order is found to increase instead of decreasing as expected, and re-entrant behavior where order is found to increase at first, and then decrease to a previous state of disorder.
Description
Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2009, 10(3), 805-816;
doi:10.3390/ijms10030805
Published by MDPI
© 2009 by the authors; licensee Molecular Diversity Preservation International, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Keywords
Triblock copolymers, self-assembly, self-consistent field theory