Formation and structure of the microemulsion phase in two-dimensional ternary AB+A+B polymeric emulsions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the formation and structure of microemulsions in two-dimensional ternary polymer blends, revealing conditions for their formation and subclassifying their types using advanced simulation and analysis methods.

Contribution

It introduces a graphical analysis approach combined with FTMC simulations to characterize microemulsion phases and identifies key geometric conditions for their formation.

Findings

Microemulsions form when lamellar curvature matches periodicity.

Evidence for genuine and defect-driven microemulsion subclasses.

Graphical analysis effectively characterizes microemulsion structures.

Abstract

We present an analysis of the structure of the fluctuation-induced microemulsion phase in a ternary blend of balanced AB diblock copolymers with equal amounts of A and B homopolymers. To this end, graphical analysis methods are employed to characterize two-dimensional configuration snapshots obtained with the recently introduced Field-Theoretic Monte Carlo (FTMC) method. We find that a microemulsion forms when the mean curvature diameter of the lamellar phase coincides roughly with the periodicity of the lamellar phase. Further, we provide evidence to the effect of a subclassification of the microemulsion into a genuine and a defect-driven region.