Distribution of Homopolymer in Lamellar Self-Assembled Diblock Copolymer/Homopolymer Blends Involving Specific Interactions

Role of Defects in Achieving Highly Asymmetric Lamellar Self-Assembly in Block Copolymer/Homopolymer Blends

Lamellar structure is a prominent state in soft condensed matter. Swelling lamellar layers to highly asymmetric structures by a second component is a facile, cost-effective strategy to impart materials with adaptive size and tunable properties. One key question that remains unsolved is how defects form and affect the asymmetric lamellar order. This study unravels the role of defects by swelling a miktoarm block copolymer with a homopolymer. Ordered lamellae first lose translational order by a significant increase in the number of dislocations and then lose orientational order by the generation of disclinations. The homopolymers are not uniformly distributed in defective lamellae and primarily segregate in the vicinity of disclination cores. The free energy of defects is mainly contributed by molecular splay and significantly alleviated by an increased radius of local curvature. This study provides direct evidence to reveal the role of defects and lamellar order in block copolymer/homopolymer blends and also sheds light on understanding analogous structural transitions in other soft systems, including lyotropic liquid crystals, phospholipid membranes, and polymer nanocomposites.

Regulating block copolymer phases via selective homopolymers

The phase behavior of strongly segregated AB diblock copolymer and selective C homopolymer blends is examined theoretically using a combination of strong stretching theory (SST) and self-consistent field theory (SCFT). The C-homopolymer is immiscible with the B-blocks but strongly attractive with the A-blocks. The effect of homopolymer content on the order-order phase transitions is analyzed. It is observed that, for AB diblock copolymers with majority A-blocks, the addition of the C-homopolymers results in lamellar to cylindrical to spherical phase transitions because of the A/C complexation. For diblock copolymers with minor A-blocks, adding C-homopolymers leads to transitions from spherical or cylindrical morphology with A-rich core to lamellae to inverted cylindrical and spherical morphologies with B-rich core. The results from analytical SST and numerical SCFT are in good agreement within most regions of the phase diagram. But the deviation becomes more obvious when the composition of A-blocks is too small and the content of added C-homopolymers is large enough, where the SCFT predicts a narrow co-existence region between different ordered phases. Furthermore, it is found that the phase behavior of the system is insensitive to the molecular weight of C-homopolymer.