Adsorption of comb copolymers on weakly attractive solid surfaces.

Selective adsorption of block copolymers on patterned surfaces.

Adsorption of copolymers on patterned surfaces is studied using lattice modeling and multiple Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. The copolymer is composed of alternating blocks of A and B monomers, and the adsorbing surface is composed of alternating square blocks containing C and D sites. Effects of interaction specificity on the adsorbed pattern of the copolymer and the sharpness of the adsorp...

How ions in solution can change the sign of the critical Casimir potential.

We show that hydrophilic ions present in a confined, near-critical aqueous mixture can lead to an attraction between like charge surfaces with opposing preferential adsorption of the two species of the mixture, even though the corresponding Casimir potential in uncharged systems is repulsive. This prediction agrees with a recent experiment [Nellen et al., Soft Matter, 2011, 7, 5360]. We also sh...

Representation of Adsorption Data for the Case of Energetically Heterogeneous Solid Surfaces Using Artificial Neural Network

Synthesis of low-cost, rubbery amphiphilic comb-like copolymers and their use in the templated synthesis of mesoporous TiO2 films for solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells.

Low-cost, rubbery amphiphilic comb-like copolymers consisting of hydrophobic poly(lauryl methacrylate) (PLMA) and hydrophilic poly(oxyethylene methacrylate) (POEM) were synthesized via one-step free radical polymerization. The synthesis of PLMA-POEM copolymers was confirmed using Fourier transform infra-red spectroscopy (FT-IR), (1)H-nuclear magnetic resonance ((1)H-NMR) and gel permeation spec...

Density functional theory model of adsorption on amorphous and microporous silica materials.

We present a novel quenched solid density functional theory (QSDFT) model of adsorption on heterogeneous surfaces and porous solids, which accounts for the effects of surface roughness and microporosity. Within QSDFT, solid atoms are considered as quenched component(s) of the solid-fluid system with given density distribution(s). Solid-fluid intermolecular interactions are split into hard-spher...