Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Commons^™

(I) Polymer Nanocomposites: Rheology And Processing For Mesoporous Materials And (Ii) Nanopatterning Of Metal Oxides Using Soft Lithography, Rohit Kothari

Doctoral Dissertations

The research in this dissertation is categorized into two parts. The first part is focused on investigation of order-to-disorder transitions (ODT) in nanocomposites of an amphiphilic block copolymer containing various hydrogen-bonded additives, and fabrication of novel mesoporous silica based materials by utilizing such nanocomposites as templates. Disordered Pluronic®, poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO)−poly(propylene oxide) (PPO)−PEO triblock copolymer upon blending with small molecule additives containing hydrogen-bond-donating functional groups (carboxyl or hydroxyl) result into ordered nanoscale morphologies by preferentially interacting with the hydrophilic PEO chains in the Pluronic®. The dependence of ODT-temperature in these novel Pluronic®/small-molecule-additive complexes on composition, number and type of functional …