Tuning the Relaxation of Nanopatterned Polymer Films with Polymer-Grafted Nanoparticles: Observation of Entropy–Enthalpy Compensation

Environmentally Friendly Synthesis of Polymer-Grafted Nanoparticles

Tuning the Mechanical Properties of Polymer Nanocomposites Filled with Grafted Nanoparticles by Varying the Grafted Chain Length and Flexibility

By employing coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation, we simulate the spatial organization of the polymer-grafted nanoparticles (NPs) in homopolymer matrix and the resulting mechanical performance, by particularly regulating the grafted chain length and flexibility. The morphologies ranging from the agglomerate, cylinder, sheet, and string to full dispersion are observed, by gradually incr...

Modulation of protein-surface interactions on nanopatterned polymer films.

The introduction of nanoscale features brings with it a high density of surface interface boundaries and effectively introduces an additional boundary material that exhibits properties different from the surrounding surfaces. We systematically varied the feature size of self-assembled polystyrene-block-poly(methyl methacrylate) copolymer nanopatterns from 13 to 200 nm and demonstrated that the ...

Functionality of Nanopatterned Polymer Surfaces

The different methods of the nanopatterning of polymer layers, UV laser ablation, plasma depositing technique, electrochemical deposition and soft lithography are discussed as methods of surface patterning. The different surface functionalities are described, especially the effects of increased surface hydrophobicity/ superhydrophobicity created by coating substrates with low surface energy mat...

Modeling the anisotropic self-assembly of spherical polymer-grafted nanoparticles.

Recent experimental results demonstrated that polymer grafted nanoparticles in solvents display self-assembly behavior similar to the microphase separation of block copolymers and other amphiphiles. We present a mean-field theory and complementary computer simulations to shed light on the parametric underpinnings of the experimental observations. Our theory suggests that such self-assembled str...