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    Aligned Droplet Patterns by Dewetting of Polymer Bilayers

    Year: 2018

    Journal: Macromolecules, Volume 51, AUG 14, page 5485–5493

    Authors: Chiu, Ming; Wood, Jared A.; Widmer-Cooper, Asaph; Neto, Chiara

    Organizations: Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship; Australian Research Council [FT140101061]

    Dewetting of polymer thin films has been extensively studied in the past two decades as an approach to produce patterned surfaces. Here we report a novel phenomenon where dewetted polymer droplets spontaneously align on a substrate, and the alignment extends over a large scale (millimeters). The patterns are formed by dewetting a bilayer system formed by poly(4-vinylpyridine) (P4VP) thin film (80 nm) on a polystyrene (PS) thin film (100 nm) prepared by spin-coating. We investigated the mechanism of the spontaneous droplet alignment and concluded that the final aligned pattern results from series of aligned defects on the P4VP, which are formed during spin-coating. We identified experimental parameters that control the appearance and the order of the resulting aligned droplets.
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