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  • Comb and Bottlebrush Polyme...
    Abbasi, Mahdi; Faust, Lorenz; Wilhelm, Manfred

    Advanced materials (Weinheim), 06/2019, Volume: 31, Issue: 26
    Journal Article

    Comb and bottlebrush polymers present a wide range of rheological and mechanical properties that can be controlled through their molecular characteristics, such as the backbone and side chain lengths as well as the number of branches per molecule or the grafting density. This review investigates the impact of these characteristics specifically on the zero shear viscosity, strain hardening behavior, and plateau shear modulus. It is shown that for a comb polymer with an entangled backbone and entangled side chains, a maximum in the strain hardening factor and minimum in the zero shear viscosity η0 can be achieved through selection of an optimum number of branches q. Bottlebrush polymers with flexible filaments and extremely low plateau shear moduli relative to linear polymers open the door for a new class of solvent‐free supersoft elastomers, where their network modulus can be controlled through both the degree of polymerization between crosslinks, nx, and the length of the side chains, nsc, with GBB0≈ρkTnx−1(nsc+1)−1. Comb and bottlebrush polymers exhibit unusual rheological properties compared to their linear analogs due to side‐chain crowding. Investigation of the melt rheology of model branched polymers with controlled grafting density, side chain, and backbone lengths allows correlation of macroscopic flow properties such as zero shear viscosity, plateau modulus, and strain‐hardening behavior to conformational regimes by means of scaling analysis and tube theory.