Abstract
Photopolymerization is a key enabling technology offering spatial and temporal control to allow for future functional materials to be made to meet societal needs. However, gaining access to robust experimental techniques to describe the evolution of nanoscale morphology in photo-initiated polymeric systems has proven so far to be a challenging task. Here, we show that these physical transformations can be monitored and quantified at the nanoscale in situ and in real-time. It is demonstrated that the initial structural features of the liquid precursors significantly affect the final morphology and the physical properties of the resulting solid via the occurrence of local heterogeneities in the molecular mobility during the curing transformation. We have made visible how local physical arrestings in the liquid, associated with both cross-linking and vitrification, determine the length scale of the local heterogeneities forming upon curing, found to be in the 10–200 nm range.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 88 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Communications Chemistry |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 10 Jul 2020 |
Funding
The authors thank the synchrotron light source PETRA III and the beamline P03 at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) for beam time allocation. C.J.B. and S.V.R. acknowledge financial support from DESY strategic fund (DSF) “Investigation of processes for spraying and spray-coating of hybrid cellulose-based nanostructures”. DESY is a member of the Helmholtz Association (HGF). We thank financial support by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation through Wallenberg Wood Science Center at KTH. Open access funding provided by Royal Institute of Technology.