Polymerization and Structure of Opposing Polymer Brushes Studied by Computer Simulations

A model of the polymerization process during the formation of a pair of polymer brushes was designed and investigated. The obtained system consisted of two impenetrable parallel surfaces with the same number of chains grafted on both surfaces. Coarse-grained chains embedded in nodes of a face-centered cubic lattice with excluded volume interactions were obtained by a ‘grafted from’ procedure. The structure of synthesized macromolecular systems was also studied. Monte Carlo simulations using the dynamic lattice liquid model were employed using dedicated parallel machine ARUZ in a large size and time scale. The parameters of the polymerization process were found to be crucial for the proper structure of the brush. It was found that for high grafting densities, chains were increasingly compressed, and there is surprisingly little interpenetration of chains from opposite surfaces. It was predicted and confirmed that in a polydisperse sample, the longer chains have unique configurations consisting of a stretched stem and a coiled crown.

Dynamics of Opposing Polymer Brushes: A Computer Simulation Study

Opposing polymer brush systems were synthesized and investigated by molecular modeling. Chains were restricted to a face-centered cubic lattice with the excluded volume interactions only. The system was confined between two parallel impenetrable walls, with the same number of chains grafted to each surface. The dynamic properties of such systems were studied by Monte Carlo simulations based on the dynamic lattice liquid model and using a highly efficient parallel machine ARUZ, which enabled the study of large systems and long timescales. The influence of the surface density and mean polymer length on the system dynamic was discussed. The self-diffusion coefficient of the solvent depended strongly on the degree of polymerization and on the polymer concentration. It was also shown that it is possible to capture changes in solvent mobility that can be attributed to the regions of different polymer densities.

Numerical implementation of pseudo-spectral method in self-consistent mean field theory for discrete polymer chains

In the standard self-consistent field theory (SCFT), a polymer chain is modeled as an infinitely flexible Gaussian chain, and the partition function is calculated by solving a differential equation in the form of a modified diffusion equation. The Gaussian chain assumption makes the standard SCFT inappropriate for modeling of short polymers, and the discrete chain SCFT in which the partition function is obtained through recursive integrals has recently been suggested as an alternative method. However, the shape of the partition function integral makes this method much slower than the standard SCFT when calculated in the real space. In this paper, we implement the pseudospectral method for the discrete chain SCFT adopting the bead-spring or freely jointed chain (FJC) model, and a few issues such as the accurate discretization of the FJC bond function are settled in this process. With the adoption of the pseudospectral method, our calculation becomes as fast as that of the standard SCFT. The integral equation introduces a new boundary condition, the neutral boundary, which is not available in the standard SCFT solving the differential equation. This interesting physical situation is combined with the finite-range interaction model for the study of symmetric block copolymers within thin films. We find that the surface-perpendicular block copolymer lamellar phase becomes preferable to the surface-parallel one when both the top and bottom surfaces are neutral.