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Monte Carlo simulations of crystallization in heterogeneous copolymers: The role of copolymer fractions with intermediate comonomer content

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Abstract

Heterogeneous copolymers contain diverse comonomer contents among copolymers, and the extremely diverse case becomes a binary polymer blend. We report a numerical study of crystallization in two series of heterogeneous copolymers that are separated with strong and weak heterogeneities of comonomer distributions, and both of which are composed of crystallizable monomers and noncrystallizable comonomers with various compositions. A comparison of simulation results between these two series of samples demonstrates that, something like a compatibilizer in an incompatible polymer blend, copolymer fractions with intermediate comonomer contents between two compositional extremities depress the prior liquid–liquid demixing on cooling, and hence weaken the subsequent crystallization behaviors. However, we found that in these intermediate fractions, comonomers distribute quite homogeneously on each chain and the amphiphilicity occurs on multiple short sequences, rather than like on a diblock copolymer.

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Acknowledgment

We are grateful to the stimulating discussions offered by Prof. Yonggang Shangguan at Zhejiang University. The financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 20825415) and from the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2011CB606100) is appreciated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Coordination Chemistry, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, 210093, Nanjing, China

    Feng Yang, Huanhuan Gao & Wenbing Hu

  2. Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics China at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190, Beijing, China

    Feng Yang, Huanhuan Gao & Wenbing Hu

Authors
  1. Feng Yang
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  2. Huanhuan Gao
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  3. Wenbing Hu
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Correspondence to Wenbing Hu.

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Yang, F., Gao, H. & Hu, W. Monte Carlo simulations of crystallization in heterogeneous copolymers: The role of copolymer fractions with intermediate comonomer content. Journal of Materials Research 27, 1383–1388 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2012.9

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