| Abstract: |
Infiltration of polymer into the interstices of close-packed nanoparticle packings leads to the formation of highly loaded nanocomposites with superb mechanical and transport properties. Confinement of polymers has been an active area of research for years, inducing changes in glass transition temperature, dynamics, and morphology of these materials. The impact of confinement on the properties of polymer blends, particularly within the pores of nanoparticle packings, is much less understood. Our previous work funded by XSEDE used a hybrid-particle field implementation of self-consistent field theory to investigate the miscibility of polymer blends under increasing confinement within the pores of dense nanoparticle packings. We found that two polymers that would undergo macroscopic phase separation become miscible when they are subjected to extreme nanoconfinement, and the strength of the repulsion required to induce phase separation increases significantly as confinement increases.
We are requesting this ACCESS allocation to expand upon this finding by investigating the effect of polymer blend asymmetries, such as a blend of two polymers of varying length, stiffness, or nanoparticle surface interactions, on the thermodynamics and equilibrium structure of the blend. We will also investigate the equilibrium structure of block copolymers confined with dense nanoparticle packings. |
0000-0002-2315-9546