<p> Polymer brushes consist of multiple monomers connected together with one of the polymer chain's ends attached to a surface. Polymer brushes have shown great promise for a wide variety of applications including drug delivery dendrimer systems and as tunable brushes that can change their shape and physical properties in response to changes in their environment. Regularly branched polymer brushes which are structured as a function of their chemical indices are investigated here using the self-consistent mean field theory for electrically neutral polymers. The brushes were described using weighting functions, <i> f(n)</i>, were <i>n</i> was the fewest number of monomers from a specified location to a free end. Brushes with weighting functions of the form <i>f(n)=n<sup>b</sup>, f(n)=e<sup>bn</sup></i>, as well as <i>f(n)=d<sup>an</sup></i> when <i>d</i> 2 and α > 2 were found to match the parabolic free chain end profile expected, while it was determined that polymer brushes described using <i>f(n)=n<sup> b</sup></i> must be very small in order to remain in equilibrium. However, brushes described by <i>f(n)</i>=2<i>G<sup>(N-n)</sup><sub> N</sub></i> and <i>f(n)</i>2<i><sup>n</sup></i> were found to be unstable for real, positive values of the potential of the system.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:1587909 |
| Date | 19 May 2015 |
| Creators | LeSher, Daniel |
| Publisher | California State University, Long Beach |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
Page generated in 0.0016 seconds