This work presents a study of the association behavior of different length scale of tri-block polymers in aqueous solution, in the presence of oil in water microemulsion nano-droplets. We have investigated various types of multiply bridging tri-block polymers and their effect on the structure and dynamics of droplets. A detailed structural form was obtained by X-ray scattering measurements, especially with respect to the effects on the droplet sizes and even more on the interactions in the microemulsion systems induced by the bridging triblock polymer. The results show that the size of droplets is little affected by the addition of the polymer while the interactions are modified by the presence of the polymer. The dynamic response of the systems becomes much more complex with increasing number of arms and slow relaxation processes become very pronounced due to a much more efficient network formation. The distance between diffusion coefficient of slow and fast motion of droplets is increasing with increase of length scale of bridging tri-block polymer.

Keywords