title: Shear-Assisted Fabrication of Block Copolymer Agglomerates with Various Morphologies in Viscous Medium.
abstract: In this work, we have investigated the effect of laminar flow shearing on the formation of block copolymer agglomerates in viscous medium. Under a laminar flow shearing, the block copolymer solution droplets were spontaneously emulsified and were then elongated into protofibers, which in turn transformed into particles with various morphologies. Besides micro-/nanorods, which were previously reported for homopolymers, sphere and sheetlike structures were unexpectedly fabricated from block copolymers depending on the solvent quality, solvent exchange rates, and the entanglement of the polymer chains. In particular, the sheet structure, fabricated from poly(ethylene glycol)-b-polystyrene (PEG-b-PS), can be fixed by UV irradiation when photo-crosslinkable azide groups were introduced onto the polystyrene block. Surprisingly, we found that the fixed sheetlike structures show demulsification capability in tens of seconds, which may have great potential application in the separation of oil from emulsions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Polymer Materials Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology , Guangzhou 510640, China.
authors.forename: Zongpeng
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Guangzhou 510640, China.
authors.forename: Xiaoli
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Department of Polymer Materials Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology , Guangzhou 510640, China.
authors.forename: Zhou
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Department of Polymer Materials Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology , Guangzhou 510640, China.
authors.forename: Meina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Xiao
authors.affiliation: Department of Polymer Materials Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology , Guangzhou 510640, China.
authors.forename: Liangzhi
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hong
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, The Chinese University of Hong Kong , Shatin N.T., Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: To
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ngai