Authors

Mani Kuntal Sen

Type

Text

Type

Dissertation

Advisor

Sokolov, Jonathan | Koga, Tadanori | Yager, Kevin G | Nam, Chang-Yong | Koga, Tadanori.

Date

2017-05-01

Keywords

Polymer chemistry -- Materials Science -- Physics | Adsorbed layer, Flattened layer, Nano-confinement, Polymer physics, Polymer thin films, X-ray scattering

Department

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Language

en_US

Source

This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.

Identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/11401/76257

Publisher

The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.

Format

application/pdf

Abstract

In this thesis, by combining various advanced x-ray scattering, spectroscopic and other surface sensitive characterization techniques, I report the equilibrium polymer chain conformations, structures, dynamics and properties of polymeric materials at the solid-polymer melt interfaces. Following the introduction, in chapter 2, I highlight that the backbone chains (constituted of CH and CH2 groups) of the flattened polystyrene (PS) chains preferentially orient normal to the weakly interactive substrate surface via thermal annealing regardless of the initial chain conformations, while the orientation of the phenyl rings becomes randomized, thereby increasing the number of surface-segmental contacts (i.e. | enthalpic gain) which is the driving force for the flattening process of the polymer chains even onto a weakly interactive solid. In chapter 3, I elucidate the flattened structures in block copolymer (BCP) thin films where both blocks lie flat on the substrate, forming a 2D randomly phase-separated structure irrespective of their microdomain structures and interfacial energetics. In chapter 4, I reveal the presence of an irreversibly adsorbed BCP layer which showed suppressed dynamics even at temperatures far above the individual glass transition temperatures of the blocks. Furthermore, this adsorbed BCP layer plays a crucial role in controlling the microdomain orientation in the entire film. In chapter 5, I report a radically new paradigm of designing a polymeric coating layer of a few nanometers thick (“polymer nanolayer†) with anti-biofouling properties. | 109 pages

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