Nguyen-Tri Phuong, Ghassemi Payman, Carriere Pascal, Nanda Sonil, Assadi Aymen Amine, Nguyen Dinh Duc
Institute of Research and Development, Duy Tan University, Da Nang 550000, Vietnam.
Département de Chimie, Biochimie et Physique, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR), Trois-Rivières, QC G8Z 4M3, Canada.
Polymers (Basel). 2020 May 17;12(5):1142. doi: 10.3390/polym12051142.
Atomic force microscopy (AFM) has been extensively used for the nanoscale characterization of polymeric materials. The coupling of AFM with infrared spectroscope (AFM-IR) provides another advantage to the chemical analyses and thus helps to shed light upon the study of polymers. This paper reviews some recent progress in the application of AFM and AFM-IR in polymer science. We describe the principle of AFM-IR and the recent improvements to enhance its resolution. We also discuss the latest progress in the use of AFM-IR as a super-resolution correlated scanned-probe infrared spectroscopy for the chemical characterization of polymer materials dealing with polymer composites, polymer blends, multilayers, and biopolymers. To highlight the advantages of AFM-IR, we report several results in studying the crystallization of both miscible and immiscible blends as well as polymer aging. Finally, we demonstrate how this novel technique can be used to determine phase separation, spherulitic structure, and crystallization mechanisms at nanoscales, which has never been achieved before. The review also discusses future trends in the use of AFM-IR in polymer materials, especially in polymer thin film investigation.
原子力显微镜（AFM）已被广泛用于聚合物材料的纳米级表征。AFM与红外光谱仪的联用（AFM-IR）为化学分析提供了另一个优势，从而有助于推进聚合物的研究。本文综述了AFM和AFM-IR在聚合物科学应用中的一些最新进展。我们描述了AFM-IR的原理以及为提高其分辨率而进行的最新改进。我们还讨论了将AFM-IR用作超分辨率相关扫描探针红外光谱用于聚合物材料化学表征的最新进展，这些聚合物材料包括聚合物复合材料、聚合物共混物、多层膜和生物聚合物。为突出AFM-IR的优势，我们报告了在研究可混溶和不可混溶共混物的结晶以及聚合物老化方面的几个结果。最后，我们展示了如何使用这种新技术在纳米尺度上确定相分离、球晶结构和结晶机制，这是以前从未实现过的。该综述还讨论了AFM-IR在聚合物材料中应用的未来趋势，特别是在聚合物薄膜研究方面。
