Preparation Of Copolymer PS-PAA Grafted Solvent Responsive Smart Surfaces And Investigation On The Responsive Behavior

Smart surfaces are also called as adaptive/or responsive surfaces, which are the surfaces of materials with interfacial properties capable of undergoing reversible changes responding to external conditions or stimuli. With time, much interest has been cast on those tailored surfaces of which topmost layer incorporates all of the necessary elements controlling a predictable'smart'or'intelligent'surface response, or a variable surface response under different conditions. A number of approaches have been developed to reach this goal.As known that, the wetting properties depend strongly on the composition of the surfaces. The surface which has high surface energy is easy for wetting, while the surface which has low surface energy is difficult for wetting. So, it is important to find and prepare a surface containing both high surface energy and low surface energy compositions, which can be selected by different solvents. Mixed polymer brush, end-functional alkyl polymer and block polymer are usually grafted to the surfaces via"graft from"and"graft to"methods to create smart surfaces. With treatments of different solutions, the surface could be reversibly turned between hydrophobic and hydrophilic owing to the rearrangement or reorganization of polymer chains on topmost surface. However, those processes were complex and the obtained surfaces were chemical unstable, as referred in many previous reports. In addition, the responsive range is relatively narrow and the reversibility is not very good, which make the application limited.In this paper, polystyrene-poly (acrylic acid) (PS-PAA) block copolymers polymerized by atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) were covalently grafted to both smooth surface and microtextured surface. These amphiphlic...