Issue 3, 2024

Colloidal adsorption in planar polymeric brushes

Abstract

The design of nano-functionalised membranes or channels, able to effectively adsorb pollutants in aqueous solutions, is a topic that is gaining a great deal of attention in the materials science community. With this work we explore, through a combination of scaling theories and molecular dynamics simulations, the adsorption of spherical non-deformable colloidal nanoparticles within planar polymeric brushes. Our strategy is twofold: first, we generalise the Alexander-de Gennes theory for planar homopolymeric brushes to the case of diblock copolymer brushes, then we map the adsorbing homopolymeric brushes onto a diblock copolymer system, where the adsorbed colloids and all interacting monomers are considered monomers in bad solvent and we apply the generalised scaling theory to this effective diblock copolymer. This allows the prediction of the average conformation of the grafted substrate, i.e. its average height, as a function of the amount of loaded particles, as well as the introduction of a continuous mapping between a homopolymeric brush, the fraction of loaded particles and the average height of the adsorbing substrate.

Graphical abstract: Colloidal adsorption in planar polymeric brushes

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
04 Aug 2023
Accepted
20 Oct 2023
First published
23 Oct 2023
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Nanoscale Adv., 2024,6, 816-825

Colloidal adsorption in planar polymeric brushes

C. F. Vorsmann, S. Del Galdo, B. Capone and E. Locatelli, Nanoscale Adv., 2024, 6, 816 DOI: 10.1039/D3NA00598D

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