Title: Structured Polymer Nanoparticles: Granular Surface Through In-Situ Assembling

Author (Talk): Nikunjkumar Visaveliya, The City College of New York

Abstract:

Assembling polymer nanoparticles show enormous potential for hybrid properties and active functions of the materials at nanoscale owing to their interfacial and structural characteristics. Many methods, therefore, were developed to functionalize the surface and initiate assemblies with external molecular as well as nanoscale moieties. However, a key challenge is to create hierarchical architectures based on anisotropic shapes and morphologies in a single-step approach because polymers are amorphous, soft and flexible, and often end up with most common spherical shape and smooth surface at nanoscale. An approach in this work is to address this concern where wide range of different shapes and structured assembling polymer nanoparticles were produced via semi-microfluidic single-step continuous polymerization process. Dumbbell to long-chained and flower-type assembling polymer nanoparticles are the results of the polymerization-induced self-assembling of growing individual polymer nanoparticles influenced by interfacial interaction and energy minimization during ongoing polymerization. Moreover, how different derivatives of the methacrylate able to tune the structural diversity and shapes of the nanoparticles that is investigated in this report.