Rational design of nanomaterials from assembly and reconfigurability of polymer-tethered nanoparticles
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olymers/Soft Matter Prospective Article
Rational design of nanomaterials from assembly and reconfigurability of polymer-tethered nanoparticles Ryan L. Marson*, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA Trung Dac Nguyen*, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA Sharon C. Glotzer, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA; Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA Address all correspondence to Sharon C. Glotzer at [email protected] (Received 15 April 2015; accepted 13 July 2015)
Abstract Polymer-based nanomaterials have captured increasing interest over the past decades for their promising use in a wide variety of applications including photovoltaics, catalysis, optics, and energy storage. Bottom-up assembly engineering based on the self- and directed-assembly of polymer-based building blocks has been considered a powerful means to robustly fabricate and efficiently manipulate target nanostructures. Here, we give a brief review of the recent advances in assembly and reconfigurability of polymer-based nanostructures. We also highlight the role of computer simulation in discovering the fundamental principles of assembly science and providing critical design tools for assembly engineering of complex nanostructured materials.
Introduction We are in the midst of a materials revolution—a revolution in which materials will be designed, optimized, and engineered, rather than merely selected, for targeted properties, behavior, and function. Twenty-first century materials and devices will be made and tailored to target specifications, combining disparate and even competing attributes of multiple materials classes to achieve new functionality. They will be dynamic and responsive, able to reconfigure autonomously or on command, changing their appearance, strength, electronic, and other properties. Examples include reconfigurable automotive “skins” to optimize aerodynamics, smart prosthetics and bionics, shapeshifting robots, and camouflaging coatings with adaptive optical properties that, through biomimicry, match surroundings to avoid detection. This intrinsic tailorability and dynamism will contrast starkly with today’s relatively static matter that is largely chosen, rather than designed, for the task at hand.[1] Since the first studies of hard disks conducted in the late 1950s, computer simulation has evolved into a powerful, and in many cases, indispensable, tool for investigating atomic, molecular, and mesoscopic systems. Revolutionary advances in computer architectures and simulation algorithms over the past two decades have enabled computational scientists to elucidate problems spanning many orders of magnitude greater in time and length scales and from various angles. In particular, open-source molecular dynamics (MD) packages such as
* These authors contributed equally to this work.
Gromacs,[2] LAMMPS,[3
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