Block copolymers, with their complex morphologies, are widely used in many applications. A grand challenge associated with these materials is accelerating their design and discovery.
UC Santa Barbara MRSEC researchers have developed a versatile and efficient strategy by rapidly building expansive, high-quality, and detailed block copolymer libraries through a combination of controlled polymerization and chromatographic separation. X-ray scattering studies aid in screening block copolymer morphology.
A family of 16 parent diblock copolymers was synthesized and separated, leading to over 300 distinct and well-defined samples at the multigram scale, and spanning a wide range of compositions with exceptional resolution in volume fraction and domain spacing.
The precise location of order-order boundaries and the identification of morphologies with extremely narrow windows of stability are possible with these methods.
