Enlarged Stable Phase Region of Hybrid Lamella-sphere Phase Enabled by A1B1A2(B2)m Branched Tetrablock Copolymer

• 作者: Bin Zhao Mei-Jiao Liu Chao Wang Ying-Cai Chen Yu-Ci Xu
• 来源期刊: 高分子科学（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（7）
• 所属期刊栏目: ARTICLES
• 页码范围: 925-933
• 页数: 9页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

Hybrid nanostructures possess a great potential for application in advanced nanotechnologies due to the anisotropic properties from different nanophases.Our previous work demonstrated that a linear A,B1A2B2 tetrablock copolymer of symmetric overall volume fraction can self-assemble into a hybrid lamella-sphere(LS)structure by tuning the relative length of the two A-blocks through self-consistent field theory(SCFT),where the spherical and the lamellar domains are mainly composed of the long A1-and short A2-blocks,respectively.However,the phase region of LS is limited.In order to expand the stable region of LS,we change the linear A1 B1 A2B2 copolymer to a branched A1B1 A2(B2)m copolymer resulting in an increase of the local spontaneous curvature between A2-and B2-blocks.We examine the impact of the branching number m of B2-block on the stable region of LS in the phase diagram with respect to fA1 and XN for fixed fB=0.5 and fB1=0.26,and find that m=2 expands the LS region significantly in contrast to the linear architecture.On the other hand,the stability window of LS does not change notably when m=2 is increased to 3 in our calculated parameter space.