Morphologies of multicompartment micelles formed by triblock copolymers.
Multicompartment micelles are desirable for advanced applications such as drug delivery. Recently, core-shell-corona (CSC) and segmented-worm (SW) micelles formed by ABC triblock terpolymers with three mutually immiscible blocks are observed in experiments. We have performed dissipative particle dynamics simulations to study the effects of molecular architecture, block length, and solution concentration on the morphologies of ABC triblock terpolymers. The formation of CSC and SW micelles for linear and miktoarm star ABC terpolymers is confirmed in this work. In addition, we predict that different multicompartment micellar morphologies (e.g., incomplete skin-layered micelles and segmented worms) can be formed by linear copolymer with different arrangements of the three blocks.
Chou
Shih-Hao
SH
Department of Chemical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan 106, Republic of China.
Tsao
Heng-Kwong
HK
Sheng
Yu-Jane
YJ
D003198:Computer Simulation; D008823:Micelles; D008956:Models, Chemical; D011108:Polymers / Q000737:chemistry*
D008823:Micelles; D011108:Polymers