Computational and experimental investigation of morphology in thermoplastic elastomer gels composed of AB/ABA blends in B-selective solvent

Effect of network connectivity on the mechanical and transport properties of block copolymer gels

“…Variation of connectivity based on W tri has been confirmed experimentally and through simulations. 27,31 Conversely, the copolymers used in the present study should co-assemble into crosslink domains of constant size and spacing across the range of W tri studied (at fixed w p ) since the diblock and triblock copolymers have similar PS fractions and the triblock copolymer is ca. twice the length of the diblock copolymer.…”

“…Therefore, gel network connectivity decreases as more triblock copolymer is replaced with diblock copolymer, which is captured by the parameter W tri (the fraction of total copolymer accounted for by triblocks, Figure 1). 31 Multiple studies have shown that decreasing the concentration of triblock copolymer in gels with fixed total polymer concentration, w p , leads to a reduction in gel modulus. 27,32,33 Alternatively, solute transport within gels is expected to primarily be a function of w p since diblock and triblock copolymers contribute equally to total copolymer concentration.…”

Mesoscopic simulation studies on the formation mechanism of drug loaded polymeric micelles

“…To date, many available experimental technologies have been used to investigate the dynamical and structural properties of polymeric micelles, such as fluorescence probe technique, dynamic light scattering (DLS), UV-VIS spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) [10,11]. However, the detailed information on the self-assembled behavior of polymeric micelles from the experiment is difficult to obtain, because the micelles formed by polymer molecules are at nanometer scale.…”

The effect of polymer chain length on the mechanical properties of triblock copolymer gels

“…Chantawansri et al [11], computed a phase diagram of these gels as a function of solvent loading, molecular weight, and interaction parameters using dynamic density functional theory for comparison with available experimental data. Grand canonical Monte Carlo was used by Kim et al [12] to study the shape, size, distribution, and internal structures of micelles at high solvent volume fractions, while Sliozberg et al [13,14] used dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) to study the morphology of the unentangled gels composed of triblock and diblock polymers and the mechanical properties of triblock gels. Shull and coworkers [15] used the unit cell approximation in self-consistent field theory (SCFT) to study the effect of triblock copolymer midblock length and temperature on the micelle size, geometry, aggregation number, bridging fraction, solvent osmotic pressure and form factor as a compliment to experimental data.…”