Morphological Investigation of Lamellae Patterns in Diblock Copolymers under Change of Thickness and Confinement in Polar Geometry

Abstract

Mathematicians collaborate computationally with practical scientists to predict the novel morphologies soft materials, having potential applications in nanotechnology. This work presents the novel lamellae morphology that the confined diblock copolymer system displayed inside the polar geometry in order to achieve this, cell dynamics simulations (CDS) model is employed on a polar mesh to study the special impacts of confinement on the self-assembly behavior of diblock copolymer systems. Under the numerical formulation of the isotropic Laplacian with polar geometry employed in the CDS model, the set of 9-point stencil is considered to discretize the Laplacian operator on polar mesh system. FTCS finite difference mechanism is taken into consideration for discretization of Laplacian operator due to its computational efficiency and accuracy. Cell dynamics simulation is efficient simulation model for large-scale simulation as compared to the other models available in literature. In the simulation, evolutionary lamella morphology is presented with and without confinement for various sizes of the circular annular pores. A comparative review of lamella morphologies achieved by simulation in comparison of experimental study is presented, coupled with a thorough investigation of symmetric and asymmetric morphologies in captivity.