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Surface-Directed Self-Epitaxial Crystallization of Poly(ε-caprolactone) from Isotropic to Highly Orientated Lamellae
journal contribution
posted on 2020-02-20, 20:35 authored by Wei Liu, Hua-Mo Yin, Ai Shi, Wen-Jing Sun, Di-Wei Wu, Shishu Huang, Baisong Zhao, Jia-Zhuang Xu, Zhong-Ming LiWe report a facile
means to engineer oriented surface topology
of poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) via homoepitaxial crystallization.
It involved uniaxially stretching the PCL substrate, immersing the
uniaxial substrate in the PCL nutrient solution that could dissolve
a small amount of PCL solute and meanwhile ensure the integrity of
the substrate, as well as evaporating the solvent. Morphology observations
demonstrated that uniform edge-on lamellae were aligned parallelly
on the uniaxial substrate, where the orientation of epitaxial lamellae
strongly correlated with the strain of the substrate. By tracking
morphology evolution in each preparation step, the formation mechanism
of oriented lamellae was revealed. Immersion in the nutrient solution
incubated the aligned nuclei, which inherited from the featured structure
of the uniaxial substrate via inherent lattice matching. During solvent
evaporation, the chains precipitated on the preformed nuclei and spontaneously
assembled into edged-on lamellae, resulting in the formation of unique
oriented lamellae. The current effort provides insights into surface-directed
self-epitaxial crystallization, by which scalable surface topology
with a tuned structure can be obtained.