Monte-Carlo Study of Triblock Copolymer/Homopolymer Blend Films

✍ Scribed by Yongmin Huang; Han Xia; Honglai Liu; Ying Hu

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 305 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1022-1344
• DOI: 10.1002/mats.200600055

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

The morphologies of triblock copolymer/homopolymer blend films confined between two neutral hard walls were studied via MC simulations on a simple cubic lattice. For ABA/A and ABA/B blend films, the effects of φ~h~ (the volume fraction of the homopolymer) and M~h~/M~b~ (the ratio of the molecular mass of the homopolymer to that of the corresponding blocks) on the morphologies were investigated in detail. For both ABA/A and ABA/B blend films, a higher φ~h~ or M~h~/M~b~ would result in stronger macrophase separation between the triblock copolymer and homopolymer. For ABA/C blend films, M~h~/M~b~ hardly influences the morphologies of homopolymer domains regardless of whether the homopolymer C is more compatible with block A or with block B. Compared to AB/A and AB/C blend films, the morphologies of ABA/A (or ABA/B) and ABA/C blend films are much more irregular. The simulated results in this work show good consistency with experiments and other simulations.

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