Polymer and Organic Materials Commons^™

Functional Bottlebrush Polymer Additives For Thin Films And Coatings, Travis S. Laws

Doctoral Dissertations

Bottlebrush polymers are a class of highly branched polymers consisting of polymeric side chains that are densely grafted to a linear backbone. Their highly branched architecture results in surface enrichment across a broad range of materials. The goal of my research has been centered around the design of functional bottlebrush polymers and their use as surface active additives in blend films and coatings.

In the first chapter, we examine the segregation behavior of polystyrene bottlebrushes that are blended with linear polystyrene. We systematically vary the lengths of the bottlebrush backbone (Nb), side-chain (Nsc), and the linear matrix (Nm) in order …

Surface Engineering And Monomer Design For Light-Mediated Ring Opening Metathesis Polymerization, Ishan A. Fursule

Theses and Dissertations--Chemical and Materials Engineering

Stimuli-responsive materials are changing the landscape of actuated materials, optoelectronics, molecular machines, solar cells, temporary memory storage, and biomedical materials. Specifically, photo-responsive polymers have gained acceleration in research and application since the last two decades in the form of a surface coating and micro-patterns. Light as a stimulus can be coherent, mono or polychromatic, tunable for power (intensity) and energy (wavelength), and has precise spatiotemporal control. Conventional surface coating techniques such as spin coating are unable to impart properties to the coatings in terms of sturdiness, homogeneity, uniformity over the complex surface, post deposition modification, and process efficiency. Also, in …