Evaporation-induced morphology pattern of triblock copolymer A₅B₁₀C₅ in thin film: A multibody DPD simulation study

Abstract

We used multibody dissipative particle dynamics method, by which the attractive and repulsive interactions can be effectively considered, to investigate the evaporation-induced morphology patterns of triblock copolymer A₅B₁₀C₅ in thin film. With changing attractive interactions between solvent vapor and triblock copolymer that represent various selective solvents, lamellar morphology, sandwich lamellar morphology, spherical morphology and disorder morphology patterns of the thin films were obtained for both coil-coil-coil and rod-coil-coil chain architectures, respectively. The order parameter and the film thickness were calculated during the process for characterizing the film properties, and it was found that the rigid A-block of the triblock copolymer hinders the formation of an ordered structure.

Keywords

Multibody dissipative particle dynamics / Evaporation-induced / Morphology pattern / Thin film

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