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The Origins of Enhanced and Retarded Crystallization in Nanocomposite Polymers

Controlling the crystallinity of hybrid polymeric systems has an important impact on their properties and is essential for developing novel functional materials. The crystallization of nanocomposite polymers with gold nanoparticles is shown to be determined by free space between nanoparticles. Resul...

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Autor principal: Jabbarzadeh, Ahmad
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6835676/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31623232
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nano9101472
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author Jabbarzadeh, Ahmad
author_facet Jabbarzadeh, Ahmad
author_sort Jabbarzadeh, Ahmad
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description Controlling the crystallinity of hybrid polymeric systems has an important impact on their properties and is essential for developing novel functional materials. The crystallization of nanocomposite polymers with gold nanoparticles is shown to be determined by free space between nanoparticles. Results of large-scale molecular dynamics simulations reveal while crystallinity is affected by the nanoparticle size and its volume fraction, their combined effects can only be measured by interparticle free space and characteristic size of the crystals. When interparticle free space becomes smaller than the characteristic extended length of the polymer molecule, nanoparticles impede the crystallization because of the confinement effects. Based on the findings from this work, equations for critical particle size or volume fraction that lead to this confinement-induced retardation of crystallization are proposed. The findings based on these equations are demonstrated to agree with the results reported in experiments for nanocomposite systems. The results of simulations also explain the origin of a two-tier crystallization regime observed in some of the hybrid polymeric systems with planar surfaces where the crystallization is initially enhanced and then retarded by the presence of nanoparticles.
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spelling pubmed-68356762019-11-25 The Origins of Enhanced and Retarded Crystallization in Nanocomposite Polymers Jabbarzadeh, Ahmad Nanomaterials (Basel) Article Controlling the crystallinity of hybrid polymeric systems has an important impact on their properties and is essential for developing novel functional materials. The crystallization of nanocomposite polymers with gold nanoparticles is shown to be determined by free space between nanoparticles. Results of large-scale molecular dynamics simulations reveal while crystallinity is affected by the nanoparticle size and its volume fraction, their combined effects can only be measured by interparticle free space and characteristic size of the crystals. When interparticle free space becomes smaller than the characteristic extended length of the polymer molecule, nanoparticles impede the crystallization because of the confinement effects. Based on the findings from this work, equations for critical particle size or volume fraction that lead to this confinement-induced retardation of crystallization are proposed. The findings based on these equations are demonstrated to agree with the results reported in experiments for nanocomposite systems. The results of simulations also explain the origin of a two-tier crystallization regime observed in some of the hybrid polymeric systems with planar surfaces where the crystallization is initially enhanced and then retarded by the presence of nanoparticles. MDPI 2019-10-16 /pmc/articles/PMC6835676/ /pubmed/31623232 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nano9101472 Text en © 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Jabbarzadeh, Ahmad
The Origins of Enhanced and Retarded Crystallization in Nanocomposite Polymers
title The Origins of Enhanced and Retarded Crystallization in Nanocomposite Polymers
title_full The Origins of Enhanced and Retarded Crystallization in Nanocomposite Polymers
title_fullStr The Origins of Enhanced and Retarded Crystallization in Nanocomposite Polymers
title_full_unstemmed The Origins of Enhanced and Retarded Crystallization in Nanocomposite Polymers
title_short The Origins of Enhanced and Retarded Crystallization in Nanocomposite Polymers
title_sort origins of enhanced and retarded crystallization in nanocomposite polymers
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6835676/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31623232
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nano9101472
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