Impact-Adaptive Solid Single-Ion-Charged Block Copolymers

CX Zhai and LL Ke, MACROMOLECULES, 58, 7655-7662 (2025).

DOI: 10.1021/acs.macromol.5c00628

The correlation between microstructural rearrangements and shear- thickening (ST), particularly in impact-adaptive conductive/charged block copolymers (BCPs), is difficult to characterize owing to coupled effects at extremely small spatiotemporal scales. In this work, a simple and generalizable structure-property relationship in ST-charged BCPs is discovered using well-validated BCP models within a dissipative particle dynamics framework. A variety of self-assembled disordered and ordered structures (lamellae, gyroid, cylinder, and sphere) under controllable experimental parameters are subjected to shear deformations. Lamellar (L) phases correlate strongly with ST, while other ordered phases display shear-thinning instead. We characterize why different types of L phases affect the ST behavior using structural parameters, including number density profiles, alignments, viscosities, and kink numbers and distributions. Thicker domains and more layered-distributed kinks significantly enhance the degree of ST in the L-phase structure. This discovery generalizes a simple structure-property relationship that enables efficient high-throughput screening of candidate materials with ST behaviors.

Return to Publications page