Article
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Adsorption of Polymer-Grafted Nanoparticles on Curved Surfaces
Version 1
: Received: 18 February 2021 / Approved: 23 February 2021 / Online: 23 February 2021 (09:35:14 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Ozmaian, A.; Coalson, R.D.; Ozmaian, M. Adsorption of Polymer-Grafted Nanoparticles on Curved Surfaces. Chemistry 2021, 3, 382-390. Ozmaian, A.; Coalson, R.D.; Ozmaian, M. Adsorption of Polymer-Grafted Nanoparticles on Curved Surfaces. Chemistry 2021, 3, 382-390.
Abstract
Nanometer-curved surfaces are abundant in biological systems as well as in nano-sized technologies. Properly functionalized polymer-grafted nanoparticles (PGNs) adhere to surfaces with different geometries and curvatures. This work explores some of the energetic and mechanical characteristics of the adhesion of PGNs to surfaces with positive, negative and zero curvatures using Coarse-Grained Molecular Dynamics (CGMD) simulations. Our calculated free energies of binding of the PGN to the curved and flat surfaces as a function of separation distance show that curvature of the surfaces critically impacts the adhesion strength. We find that the flat surface is the most adhesive, and the concave surface is the least adhesive surface. This somewhat counterintuitive finding suggests that while a bare nanoparticle is more likely to adhere to a positively curved surface than a flat surface, grafting polymer chains to the nanoparticle surface inverts this behavior. Moreover, we studied the rheological behavior of PGN upon separation from the flat and curved surfaces under external pulling force. The results presented herein can be exploited in drug delivery and self-assembly applications.
Keywords
adhesion; self-assembly; drug delivery; curved surface; template-assisted self-assembly; nanotechnology; single-molecule system; polymer nanocomposite.
Subject
Chemistry and Materials Science, Physical Chemistry
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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