Concentration controlled multilevel self‐assembly of 3‐armed poly(ethylene glycol)‐b‐poly(ε‐caprolactone) block copolymers investigated by AFM |
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| Authors: | Shengrong Guo Yaqiong Zhang |
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| Institution: | 1. School of Pharmacy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 200240 Shanghai, People's Republic of China;2. Shengrong Guo and Yaqiong Zhang contributed equally to this work. |
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| Abstract: | Concentration dependent morphology of 3‐armed poly(ethylene glycol)‐b‐poly(ε‐caprolactone) copolymer aggregates in aqueous system was investigated by atomic force microscopy (AFM). The AFM results show that, at a low concentration, 4 × 10?5 g/mL, spherical micelles occur, and unmicellized molecules are not distributed homogeneously in the copolymer aqueous solution. Unequal outspread clusters composed of wormlike aggregates are formed at a moderate copolymer concentration, 4 × 10?4 g/mL, those wormlike aggregates are orderly packed in the clusters. At a high concentration of 0.05 g/mL, the copolymer aqueous system is indeed a gel at room temperature, outspread clusters of wormlike aggregates join together to forma network structure. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 46: 1412–1418, 2008 |
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| Keywords: | aggregates atomic force microscopy (AFM) block copolymers gel morphology self‐assembly |
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