A single parent diblock copolymer can be purified by automated chromatography to give libraries of well-defined, low dispersity block copolymers on multi-gram scale.
Intellectual merit: Using automated and operationally simple chromatographic separation, a versatile and scalable strategy has been developed for the rapid generation of block copolymer libraries. From a single parent copolymer, a wide variety of block copolymer libraries can be obtained on multigram scales. The resulting phase diagrams have increased detail and richness when compared to those constructed by traditional approaches.
Broader Impacts: Results from the current study democratizes the synthesis of block copolymers, allowing non-experts access to these important material building blocks. Significantly, this accelerated approach substantially simplifies the exploration of block copolymer phase space across a range of compositions and segregation strengths.
