| 초록 |
The aggregation of amphiphilic block copolymers in solution to form micelles has attracted great interest in recent years because of its importance in industrial applications. Many studies on these systems have mainly focused on a di- or triblock copolymer and much less attention was given to other architectures such as cyclic block copolymer. Recent experimental work by Booth and co-workers has extended those works to include a cyclic diblock copolymer, made by end-linking the triblock copolymer. Although the micellization of the cyclic copolymer seemed to be favored over that of the linear triblock copolymer, two block copolymers had similar values of cmc. In the present work, micellization of cyclic copolymer (cyclo-B9A8) was simulated by Brownain dyanmics and micellar behavior is compared with triblock copolymer (A4B9A4) to investigate more systematically the effect of molecular architecture. Critical micelle concentration (cmc), micellar molar mass and size were compared with corresponding quantities measured for linear triblock copolymers having the same chain length and composition. The cmc of cyclo-B9A8 was slightly smaller than that of A4B9A4. Average micelle size for cyclo-B9A8 was also slightly larger than that of A4B9A4 which could be explained by simple geometrical arguments. |
