Liquid Crystalline Assembly of Rod–Coil Molecules - Liquid Crystalline Functional Assemblies and Their Supramolecular Structures - page 67

Fig. 2 Mesophases of the rod-coil diblock molecules by the increasing volume fraction of
coil segments
periods of these supramolecular structures are typically in a range of less
than 10 nm. This structural variation can be explained by considering the fact
that increasing coil volume fraction leads to a structure with larger interfa-
cial area, similar to the well-known conventional diblock copolymer phase
behavior [13, 34, 35].
A strategy to manipulate supramolecular structures assembled from rod
segments may be accessible by the alteration of the coil architecture (lin-
ear ( 5 )versusbranched( 6 )) in the rod-coil system [36]. On the basis of
SAXS and TEM results, rod-coil molecules ( 5 ) with a linear PPO coil showed
a honeycomb-like lamellar rod assembly with hexagonally arrayed PPO coil
perforations, while the rod-coil molecules ( 6 ) with a dibranched PPO coil
self-organized into rod-bundles with a body-centered tetragonal symmetry
surrounded by a PPO coil matrix (Fig. 3). The notable feature is that a sim-
Fig. 3 3D supramolecular structural change from organized honeycombs ( 5 )toorganized
bundles ( 6 ), dependent upon the coil architectural variation of the rod-coil molecule