oc8b00240_si_001.pdf (2.12 MB)
Download fileTaming the Strength of Interfacial Interactions via Nanoconfinement
journal contribution
posted on 2018-06-05, 00:00 authored by David Nieto Simavilla, Weide Huang, Caroline Housmans, Michele Sferrazza, Simone NapolitanoThe
interaction between two immiscible materials is related to
the number of contacts per unit area formed by the two materials.
For practical reasons, this information is often parametrized by the
interfacial free energy, which is commonly derived via rather cumbersome
approaches, where properties of the interface are described by combining
surface parameters of the single materials. These combining
rules, however, neglect any effect that geometry might have
on the strength of the interfacial interaction. In this Article, we
demonstrate that the number of contacts at the interface between a
thin polymer coating and its supporting substrate is altered upon
confinement at the nanoscale level. We show that explicitly considering
the effect of nanoconfinement on the interfacial potential allows
a quantitative prediction of how sample geometry affects the number
of contacts formed at the interface between two materials.