Recent developments in the formation, characterization, and simulation of micron and nano-scale droplets of amorphous polymer blends and semi-crystalline polymers

Polymer micro- and nano-particles are fundamental to a number of modern technological applications, including polymer blends or alloys, biomaterials for drug delivery systems, electro-optic and luminescent devices, coatings, polymer powder impregnation of inorganic fibers in composites, and are also critical in polymer-supported heterogeneous catalysis. In this article, we review some of our recent progress in experimental and simulation methods for generating, characterizing, and modeling polymer micro- and nano-particles in a number of polymer and polymer blend systems. By using instrumentation developed for probing single fluorescent molecules in micron-sized liquid droplets, we have shown that polymer particles of nearly arbitrary size and composition can be made with a size dispersion that is ultimately limited by the chain length and number distribution within the droplets. Depending on the time scale for solvent evaporation—a tunable parameter in our experiments—phase separation of otherwise immiscible polymers can be avoided by confinement effects, producing homogeneous polymer blend micro- or nano-particles. These particles have tunable properties that can be controlled simply by adjusting the size of the particle, or the relative mass fractions of the polymer components in solution. Physical, optical, and mechanical properties of a variety of micro and nano-particles, differing in size and composition, have been examined using extensive classical molecular dynamics calculations in conjunction with experiments to gain deeper insights into fundamental nature of their structure, dynamics, and properties.