Related papers: Origins of elastic properties in ordered nanocompo…
The presence of nanoparticles in a diblock copolymer leads to changes in the morphology and properties of the matrix and can produce highly organized hybrid materials. The resulting material properties depend not only on the polymer…
Block copolymer melts self-assemble in the bulk into a variety of nanostructures, making them perfect candidates to template the position of nanoparticles. The morphological changes of block copolymers are studied in the presence of a…
Some of our recent studies of the structure and mechanical properties of a special type of nanocomposite are reviewed here. In silica-latex systems, a latex film with silica inclusions is formed from a colloidal solution of both components.…
In layered materials, a common mode of deformation involves buckling of the layers under tensile deformation in the direction perpendicular to the layers. The instability mechanism, which operates in elastic materials from geological to…
Assemblies of purely repulsive and frictionless particles, such as emulsions or hard spheres, display very curious properties near their jamming transition, which occurs at the random close packing for mono-disperse spheres. Although such…
Nanocomposite materials made of block copolymer and nanoparticles display properties which can be different from the purely polymeric matrix. The resulting material is a crossover of the original properties of the block copolymer and the…
Vesicles self-assembled from amphiphilic diblock copolymers exhibit a wide diversity of behavior upon electroporation, due to competitions between edge, surface and bending energies that drive the system, while different viscous dissipation…
This Letter is motivated by some recent experiments on pan-cake shaped nano-samples of metallic glass that indicate a decline in the measured shear modulus upon decreasing the sample radius. Similar measurements on crystalline samples of…
Nanoparticles can influence the properties of polymer materials by a variety of mechanisms. With fullerene, carbon nanotube, and clay or graphene sheet nanocomposites in mind, we investigate how particle shape influences the melt shear…
The relation between elasticity and yielding is investigated in a model polymer solid by Molecular-Dynamics simulations. By changing the bending stiffness of the chain and the bond length, semicrystalline and disordered glassy polymers -…
Cell membranes are out of thermodynamic equilibrium notably because of membrane recycling, i.e. active exchange of material with the cytosol. We propose an analytically tractable model of biomembrane predicting the effects of recycling on…
We investigate how the microstructure of a colloidal polycrystal influences its linear viscoelasticity. We use thermosensitive copolymer micelles that arrange in water in a cubic crystalline lattice, yielding a colloidal polycrystal. The…
Shearing of nanocomposites has shown to produce ordered nanostructures and orientation in the polymeric matrix. Due to the importance of the formation of an ordered structure of nanoparticles in a polymeric matrix to device wearable,…
Nanoscale polymeric thin films are widely used in diverse applications such as energy devices, flexible electronics and biosensors, where a satisfactory mechanical performance is of vital importance to realize their full functionality. It…
Sphere-patterned ultrathin block copolymers films are potentially interesting for a variety of applications in nanotechnology. We use self-consistent field theory to investigate the elastic response of sphere monolayer films with respect to…
We present several ordering mechanisms in diblock copolymers. For temperatures above the order-disorder temperature and in the weak segregation regime, a linear response theory is presented which gives the polymer density in the vicinity of…
Polymer nanoparticle composites (PNC) with ultra high loading of nanoparticles (> 50%) have been shown to exhibit markedly improved strength, stiffness, and toughness simultaneously compared to the neat systems of their components. Recent…
Thin films of diblock copolymer subject to gravitational field are simulated by means of a cell dynamical system model. The difference in density of the two sides of the molecule and the presence of the field causes the formation of…
We extensively study the phase diagram of a diblock copolymer melt confined in a cylindrical nanopore using real-space self-consistent mean-field theory. We discover a rich variety of new two-dimensional equilibrium structures that have no…
Manipulating the self-assembly nanostructures with combined different control measures is emerging as a promising route for numerous applications to generate templates and scaffolds for nanostructured materials. Here, the two different…