Early career: Templating of liquid crystal microstructures by reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer polymerization
- Iowa State Univ., Ames, IA (United States)
This research has shown that the microstructure of self-assembled copolymers can be decoupled from the polymer chemistry. The simplest polymer architecture, linear block copolymers, is valuable for a broad range of applications, including adhesives and coatings, medical devices, electronics and energy storage, because these block copolymers reproducibly self-assemble into microphase separated nanoscale domains. Unfortunately, the self-assembled microstructure is tuned by polymer composition, thus limiting the potential to simultaneously optimize chemical, mechanical, and transport properties for desired applications. To this end, much work was been put into manipulating block copolymer self-assembly independently of polymer composition. These efforts have included the use of additives or solvents to alter polymer chain conformation, the addition of a third monomer to produce ABC triblock terpolymers, architectures with mixed blocks, such as tapered/gradient polymers, and the synthesis of other nonlinear molecular architectures. This work has shown that the microstructures formed by linear ABC terpolymers can be altered by controlling the architecture of the polymer molecules at a constant monomer composition, so that the microstructure is tuned independently from the chemical properties.
- Research Organization:
- Iowa State Univ., Ames, IA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0003927
- OSTI ID:
- 1166808
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-ISU-03927
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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