Chemical Engineering Commons^™

Generation Of Multicomponent Polymer Blend Microparticles Using Droplet Evaporation Technique And Modeling Evaporation Of Binary Droplet Containing Non-Volatile Solute, Venkat N. Rajagopalan

Theses and Dissertations--Chemical and Materials Engineering

Recently, considerable attention has been focused on the generation of nano- and micrometer scale multicomponent polymer particles with specifically tailored mechanical, electrical and optical properties. As only a few polymer-polymer pairs are miscible, the set of multicomponent polymer systems achievable by conventional methods, such as melt blending, is severely limited in property ranges. Therefore, researchers have been evaluating synthesis methods that can arbitrarily blend immiscible solvent pairs, thus expanding the range of properties that are practical. The generation of blended microparticles by evaporating a co-solvent from aerosol droplets containing two dissolved immiscible polymers in solution seems likely to exhibit a …