Combined experimental and simulation studies of crosslinked polymer brushes under shear

Singh, M. K., Kang, C., Ilg, P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7518-5543, Crockett, R., Kroger, M. and Spencer, N. D. (2018) Combined experimental and simulation studies of crosslinked polymer brushes under shear. Macromolecules, 51 (24). pp. 10174-10183. ISSN 0024-9297 doi: 10.1021/acs.macromol.8b01363

Abstract/Summary

We have studied the effect of crosslinking on the tribological behavior of polymer brushes using a combined experimental and theoretical approach. Tribological and indentation measurements on poly(glycidyl methacrylate) brushes and gels in the presence of dimethylformamide solvent were obtained by means of atomic force microscopy. To complement experiments, we have performed corresponding molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations of a generic bead-spring model in the presence of explicit solvent and crosslinkers. Our study shows that crosslinking leads to an increase in friction between polymer brushes and a counter-surface. The coefficient of friction increases with increasing degree of crosslinking and decreases with increasing length of the crosslinker chains. We find that the brush-forming polymer chains in the outer layer play a significant role in reducing friction at the interface.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/81226
Identification Number/DOI	10.1021/acs.macromol.8b01363
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Publisher	American Chemical Society
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