Structure, Self-Assembly, and Emerging Functionality of Polymers and Their Composites
A special issue of Polymers (ISSN 2073-4360). This special issue belongs to the section "Polymer Physics and Theory".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2022) | Viewed by 474
Special Issue Editors
Interests: polymer modelling; atomistic modelling; hard spheres; crystallisation; statistical mechanics
Interests: polymer nanocomposites; penetrable particle mixtures; integral equation theory; statistical mechanics; grafted nanoparticle systems
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Polymers have traditionally been used in plastics, rubbers, coatings, and as structural materials due to properties such as elasticity, malleability, mechanical strength, or thermal resistance. More recent emergent applications of polymers and their composites are as separation membranes, fuel cell membranes, microgels, optically active materials, conducting materials, materials for drug delivery, opto-electronically active materials, and biologically active materials. These new functionalities are a consequence of research into the understanding of microscopic structure of polymers and their composites. In particular, they are a result of developing and using new combinations of polymers, copolymers, nanoparticles, and polymer-grafted nanoparticles, as well as understanding the physics of active particles and active polymers.
Understanding the structure, dynamics, and self-assembly of novel polymer-based hybrid materials is a key thrust of modern materials science due to the vast number of combinations of microstructural, mechanical, conductive, optical, electrical, thermal, and optoelectronic properties that these materials can have. Over the last two decades, much of the progress in predicting the structure, self-assembly, and dynamics has been made through theory as well as molecular and mesoscopic simulations. Theoretical insights into polymer entropy and polymer dynamics have been used to explain how polymer chains behave when in the presence of nanoparticles. Both theory and simulations have been used to gain a greater understanding of the structure, phase behavior. and dynamics of polymer-based hybrid materials. As the set of possible combinations of hybrid materials expands, the importance of insights from theory and simulations increases as a path to systematize our understanding of such materials.
The focus of this Special Issue of Polymers is to underscore recent progress made by theory and simulations toward gaining a systematic understanding of the structure, self-assembly, and emerging functionality of polymers and their composites.
Prof. Dr. Manuel Laso
Prof. Dr. Mukta Tripathy
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- polymer structure
- polymer dynamics
- self-assembly
- nanoparticles
- polymer functionality
- nanocomposites
- active polymers
- polymer-grafted nanoparticles
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