Growth and Bulk Effects of Irreversibly Adsorbed Layers in Polymer Nanocomposites

Recent studies have demonstrated that the formation of irreversibly adsorbed layers at the polymer-substrate interface can significantly affect the overall properties in thin films. However, little attention has focused on the polymer nanocomposites, where irreversibly adsorbed layer growth is expected to be an important parameter due to the amount of surface area and high temperature processing. In this work, we characterize the growth of irreversibly adsorbed layers of polystyrene atop silica nanoparticles, which we correlate to the resulting bulk properties of polystyrene-silica nanocomposites. Our approach compares bulk properties measured via traditional means such as DSC with a direct measurement of local properties achieved by fluorescence spectroscopy. We expect the characterization of irreversibly adsorbed layers and their bulk effects to be useful in engineering new polymer nanocomposite materials.