Break

Compatibilization of polymer blends can produce tunable materials with a wide range of mechanical, thermal, and transport properties, making them attractive for applications, such as advanced coatings, membranes, ion channels, and high-performance nanocomposites. However, achieving a miscible blend remains a significant challenge, as most polymer pairs are inherently immiscible. Traditional compatibilization methods, such as copolymer addition or chemical modification, often fail to provide the desired control over blend properties. Nanoparticles have emerged as promising compatibilizers due to their ability to alter interfacial interactions; however, most previous work has only been able to consider relatively low nanoparticle concentrations. This poster presents a comprehensive computational study using theoretically informed Langevin dynamics to explore the phase behavior of a polymer blend systemthat is highly loaded with nanoparticles. Specifically, we investigate thermodynamic interactions within the interstitial spaces of densely packed nanoparticle-copolymer systems, where one polymer preferentially wets the nanoparticle surface. These simulations provide detailed insight into how the morphology and phase separation of polymer blends are affected by varying degrees of asymmetric wetting and confinement in nanoparticle packings. The structure of the confined system is characterized by the structure factor computing during quenching, similar to what experiments would measure in X-ray scattering. The results of the simulation reveal that the length scale of the phase-separated structures is significantly influenced by the degree of wetting asymmetry. Systems with asymmetric polymer-nanoparticle interactions exhibit smaller phase-separated domains compared to systems with symmetric interactions. This reduction in domain size suggests that confinement by the nanoparticles can be a novel strategy to tune the phase-separation length scale. The implications of these findings are significant for advancing the design of finely tuned nanocomposite materials and may open the door to the design of novel polymer nanocomposites with unique chemical environments that could be used for membranes or other technological applications.