Engineering Commons^™

Mass-Transfer Driven Spinodal Decomposition In A Ternary Polymer Solution, Douglas R. Tree, Lucas F. Dos Santos, Caden B. Wilson, Timothy R. Scott, Jan Ulric Garcia, Glenn H. Fredrickson

Faculty Publications

Nonsolvent induced phase separation (NIPS) is a widely occuring process used in industrial membrane production, nanotechnology and Nature to produce microstructured polymer materials. A variety of process-dependent morphologies are produced when a polymer solution is exposed to a nonsolvent that, following a period where mass is exchanged, precipitates and solidifies the polymer. Despite years of investigation, both experimental and theoretical, many questions surround the pathways to the microstructures that NIPS can produce. Here, we provide simulation results from a model that simultaneously captures both the processess of solvent/nonsolvent exchange and phase separation. We show that the time it takes the …