Material properties of phase-separated structures of block copolymer-nanoparticle composites

Importing structures calculated by DPD into Digimat-FE

Objectives and Methods

Block copolymers, which are composed of multiple polymers, are known to have various phase-separated structures depending on their block ratio. In this case study, the effect of the difference in the phase separation structure on the mechanical and thermal properties was evaluated by finite element analysis using Digimat-FE.

The phase separation structure obtained by J-OCTA can be output in STL format. Next, the STL model output from J-OCTA was imported into Digimat-FE, and mechanical and heat conduction analyses were performed to obtain the material properties.

Analysis Results

Figure 2 shows the phase-separated structures of the diblock copolymers obtained by DPD.

Figures 3 and 4 show the results of calculations using these structures with the solvers FE/Solver and FFT Solver included in Digimat-FE.

It can be confirmed that A10B10 and A6B14 are anisotropic in both tensile and heat conduction analysis due to their phase separated structure. On the other hand, A3B17 shows almost isotropy because the A phase is uniformly dispersed in the B phase.

In the movie, in addition to the phase separation structure introduced in this page, analysis using the filler dispersion structure obtained by J-OCTA is also performed.

https://www.j-octa.com/cases/caseS10/

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