Microphase separation of stimuli-responsive interpenetrating network microgels investigated by scattering methods

Link between Morphology, Structure, and Interactions of Composite Microgels

“…The results of fitting the experimental SANS intensity profiles using the star polymer model of eq are shown as solid lines in Figure a. Note that the fuzzy sphere model typically used for microgels failed to properly describe the data (Figure S3 of the Supporting Information), in agreement with a recent work where modifications on the topology of a PNIPAM microgel by the presence of an interpenetrating polymer network were also not well-described by the fuzzy sphere model . At 20 and 30 °C the star polymer model nicely fits the experimental data at all q values.…”

Effect of network topology and crosslinker reactivity on microgel structure and ordering at liquid–liquid interface

“…One may conclude that the used simulation protocol will allow studying the behavior of various microgels architectures (including hollow, amphiphilic or consisting of interpenetrating networks 22 ) obtained by the precipitation polymerization technique at the liquid interface. These systems will be covered in the future research.…”

“…17–19 Moreover, both approaches usually provide complementary research. 20–22 Generally, the simulations utilize the microgel models with an ideal architecture based on the diamond-like lattice. 17,18,21 Such structures can be considered as idealized models of microgels synthesized via (mini)emulsion, 21 template 23 or microfluidics-based 24 polymerization, since crosslinks are distributed more-or-less homogeneously throughout the microgel due to the physical principle behind these methods – a confinement of the reacting species in a volume which is occupied by the microgel in the course of its synthesis.…”

“…25 To model such microgels, the in silico synthesized particle models were developed recently. 19,20,22,26,27 One of them 27 mimics the realistic radical-free precipitation polymerization of colloidal networks. The simulated behavior of the resulting microgels was found to be in good agreement with the experimental PNIPAM systems in terms of the synthesis kinetics, structure factor, and collapse–decollapse curves.…”

Double dynamic hydrogels formed by wormlike surfactant micelles and cross-linked polymer

“…The microphase separation was considered as a universal feature of polyelectrolyte systems that occurs in all cases when there are trends to component segregation at smaller scales and stabilization by the long-range factor preventing total demixing [63]. The microphase separation has been studied in many systems including mixtures of charged and neutral polymers [64], mixtures of two likely charged polyelectrolytes with different amount of charge [63], stoichiometric blends of oppositely and weakly charged polyelectrolytes, which would be immiscible in the absence of charged units [65,66], copolymer networks [67,68] and interpenetrating polymer networks [69]. It was shown theoretically that the size of the microphase separated domains in polyelectrolyte systems is determined mainly electrostatically [66].…”