Guerin Gerald, Cruz Menandro, Yu Qing
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Advanced Polymeric Materials, Key Laboratory for Ultrafine Materials of Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3H6, Canada.
Sci Adv. 2020 Apr 15;6(16):eaaz7301. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz7301. eCollection 2020 Apr.
The fabrication of three-dimensional (3D) objects by polymer self-assembly in solution is extremely challenging. Here, multi-tori mesostructures were obtained from the crystallization-driven self-assembly of a coil-crystalline block copolymer (BCP) in mixed solvents. The formation of these structures follows a multistep process. First, the BCP self-assembles into amorphous micrometer-large vesicles. Then, the BCP confined in these mesosized vesicles crystallizes. This second step leads to the formation of objects with shapes ranging from closed 3D multi-tori spherical shells to 2D toroid mesh monolayers, depending on the solvent mixture composition. This approach demonstrates how topological constraints induced by the specific interactions between coil-crystalline BCP and solvents can be used to prepare mesostructures of complex morphologies.
通过聚合物在溶液中的自组装来制造三维（3D）物体极具挑战性。在此，通过一种线圈 - 晶体嵌段共聚物（BCP）在混合溶剂中的结晶驱动自组装获得了多环中观结构。这些结构的形成遵循多步过程。首先，BCP自组装成无定形的微米级大囊泡。然后，限制在这些介观尺寸囊泡中的BCP结晶。根据溶剂混合物组成，第二步导致形成形状从封闭的3D多环球壳到2D环形网状单层不等的物体。这种方法展示了如何利用线圈 - 晶体BCP与溶剂之间的特定相互作用所引起的拓扑约束来制备具有复杂形态的中观结构。
