Composites: Morphology

Abstract

Nanocomposite materials have attracted much attention for their high functionality in recent years, and it is important to understand and be able to manipulate their microstructure. To understand the cause of the phase separation and the influence of fillers, we performed a dissipative particle dynamics simulation of filler dispersion in the system of a diblock copolymer. It is clear that the dispersion of filler in the phase-separated structure by the diblock copolymers is affected by the interaction parameter that is determined by the Flory–Huggins χ parameter of the fillers and the polymers, the block ratio of the diblock copolymer, and the shape of the filler. On this basis, the fillers are dispersed, aggregated, or stacked. As an application, we attempted multiscale analysis implementing OCTA. We conducted a heat conduction simulation employing the finite difference method by “zooming” out the structure obtained from the result of dissipative particle dynamics and evaluated the average properties of the nanocomposite materials. It was observed that the thermal conductivity depends on the dispersion of the fillers.