Abstract: Confining polymers in thin films causes significant deviations of their structural and dynamical properties from their bulk phase behaviour. In our presentation, we show the different effect of the substrate on binary polymer blends with linear and cyclic architecture, as well as miktoarm star polymers in the presence of explicit solvent, by means of extensive molecular dynamics simulations. In the first case, we discuss the role of enthalpic and entropic factors of the interfacial free energy of the system in determining which species in the blend preferentially adsorbs at the substrate [1,2]. In the case of miktoarm polymers, we vary the solvent-block interaction to monitor the effect on the morphology and self-assembly of the polymer film [3].

Reference:
[1] G. Pellicane, M. M. Tchoukouegno, G. T. Mola and M. Tsige, 2016. Surface enrichment driven by polymer topology, Physical Review E Rapid Communications, 93, 050501.
[2] F. M. Gaitho and G. Pellicane, 2019. Adsorption of binary polymer mixtures with different topology on a wall, Results in Physics,12, 975.
[3] Z. Workineh, G. Pellicane and M. Tsige, 2020. Tuning solvent quality induces morphological phase transitions in miktoarm star polymer films, Macromolecules, 53(15), 6151.

Biography: Dr Pellicane is an Assistant Professor in the BIOMORF department, at the University of Messina (Italy) and a honorary Associate Professor in the School of Chemistry and Physics, at the University of Kwazulu-Natal (South Africa), where he has been working since 2011 before moving to Italy at the end of 2019. He is the author of more than 60 peer-reviewed articles indexed in the web of Science – core collection database. His field of expertise is the theory and computer simulation of simple/complex fluids.