1 research outputs found
Polymerization-Induced Nanostructural Transitions Driven by In Situ Polymer Grafting
Polymerization-induced structural
transitions have gained attention
recently due to the ease of creating and modifying nanostructured
materials with controlled morphologies and length scales. Here, we
show that order–order and disorder–order nanostructural
transitions are possible using in situ polymer grafting from the diblock
polymer, poly(styrene)-<i>block</i>-poly(butadiene). In
our approach, we are able to control the resulting nanostructure (lamellar,
hexagonally packed cylinders, and disordered spheres) by changing
the initial block polymer/monomer ratio. The nanostructural transition
occurs by a grafting from mechanism in which poly(styrene) chains
are initiated from the poly(butadiene) block via the creation of an
allylic radical, which increases the overall molecular weight and
the poly(styrene) volume fraction. The work presented here highlights
how the chemical process of converting standard linear diblock copolymers
to grafted block polymers drives interesting and controllable polymerization-induced
morphology transitions