Zirconium oxide (ZrO2) is a well-studied and promising material due to its remarkable chemical and physical properties. It is used, for example, in coatings for corrosion protection layer, wear and oxidation, in optical applications (mirror, filters), for decorative components, for anti-counterfeiting solutions and for medical applications. ZrO2 can be obtained as a thin film using different deposition methods such as physical vapor deposition (PVD) or chemical vapor deposition (CVD). These techniques are mastered but they do not allow easy micro-nanostructuring of these coatings due to the intrinsic properties (high melting point, mechanical and chemical resistance). An alternative approach described in this paper is the sol-gel method, which allows direct micro-nanostructuring of the ZrO2 layers without physical or chemical etching processes, using optical or nano-imprint lithography. In this paper, the authors present a complete and suitable ZrO2 sol-gel method allowing to achieve complex micro-nanostructures by optical or nano-imprint lithography on substrates of different nature and shape (especially non-planar and foil-based substrates). The synthesis of the ZrO2 sol-gel is presented as well as the micro-nanostructuring process by masking, colloidal lithography and nano-imprint lithography on glass and plastic substrates as well as on plane and curved substrates.
We use coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations to study the impact of the chain topology on the structure and thermal and mechanical properties of crystallizable multiblock copolymers. We investigate linear, star, comb, and ring topologies for which we vary in a systematic way the content in crystallizable units through the length of the so-called "hard segments" while keeping the overall molecular weight constant. Our results emphasize that the crystallization temperature is driven by the hard-segment length, regardless of the chain topology and the fraction of crystallizable units in the material. The variation of the topology however leads to major structural differences. While ring molecules (and comb ones to a lesser extent) tend to form a high number of small and well-distributed crystallites, their linear and star counterparts result in much coarser clusters from 12% of crystallizable units. This trend is further enhanced for higher hardsegment contents until ca. 20% where ring molecules start to form wormlike clusters. The shear modulus at rest is systematically computed by following the Green−Kubo method, which demonstrates the role of (i) the average cluster's size and (ii) the network connectivity. Beyond contributing to the understanding of the structure−property relationship of thermoplastic elastomers, the peculiar nature of the molecules investigated in this work also extends the fundamental knowledge of polymer crystallization.
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