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Dewetting Kinetics of Thin Polymer Films with Different Architectures: Effect of Polymer Adsorption

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Abstract

We have investigated the influence of the adsorption process on the dewetting behavior of the linear polystyrene film (LPS), the 3-arm star polystyrene film (3SPS) and the ring polystyrene film (RPS) on the silanized Si substrate. Results show that the adsorption process greatly influences the dewetting behavior of the thin polymer films. On the silanized Si substrate, the 3SPS chains exhibit stronger adsorption compared with the LPS chains and RPS chains; as a result, the wetting layer forms more easily. For LPS films, with the decrease of annealing temperature, the kinetics of polymer film changes from exponential behavior to slip dewetting. As a comparison, the stability of 3SPS and RPS films switches from slip dewetting to unusual dewetting kinetic behavior. The adsorbed nanodroplets on the solid substrate play an important role in the dewetting kinetics by reducing the driving force of dewetting and increase the resistant force of dewetting. Additionally, Brownian dynamics (BD) simulation shows that the absolute values of adsorption energy (ε) gradually increase from linear polymer (−0.3896) to ring polymer (−0.4033) and to star polymer (−0.4264), which is consistent with the results of our adsorption experiments.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dr. Ming-Ming Ding for help with Brownian dynamics simulations. This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51473168, 21234007, 21674114, 51503048, 51573131 and 21374077) and the grant of Guizhou Education University (No. 107003001455) and the Natural Science Foundation of Guizhou Province (No. QKHJC[ 2017]1137).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Li-Na Wang & Shi-Chun Jiang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, 130022, China

    Li-Na Wang, Huan-Huan Zhang, Tong-Fei Shi & Li-Jia An

  3. Laboratory of Surface Physics and Chemistry, Guizhou Education University, Guiyang, 550018, China

    Lin Xu

  4. Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, 300130, China

    Bin-Yuan Liu

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  1. Li-Na Wang
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Correspondence to Lin Xu, Tong-Fei Shi or Shi-Chun Jiang.

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Wang, LN., Zhang, HH., Xu, L. et al. Dewetting Kinetics of Thin Polymer Films with Different Architectures: Effect of Polymer Adsorption. Chin J Polym Sci 36, 984–990 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10118-018-2111-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10118-018-2111-1

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