Accelerated Crystal Nucleation at Liquid Interfaces

Liquid interfaces are prevailing within the immiscible polymer blends and solutions. The effect of interfaces to polymer crystallization cannot be overlooked, not only because the practical system accumulates impurities at interfaces for heterogeneous crystal nucleation, but also because the thermodynamic conditions for crystal nucleation at interfaces are different from that in the bulk phase. The latter effect can be revealed by the theoretical phase diagrams for immiscible polymer blends, as 

11 Interplay Between Phase Separation and Polymer Crystallization 

When a polymer solution becomes extremely diluted, each polymer chain will be surrounded only by solvent molecules, which constitutes an isolated single-chain system. Since a flexible polymer chain contains a large number of monomers, and each monomer may contain variable chemical structures with multiple interactions such as hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic and hydrophilic interactions, the phase transition behaviors of such a small system will be very complicated. A typical example is the protein folding from a random coil to its native state. Various interactions between monomers make diverse contributions to the self-assembly behaviors of proteins. Such a single-chain system is often regarded as the smallest complex system in the world. 

Hsien Wu first proposed that the mechanism for a protein to lose its living function is the unfolding of its native conformation (Wu 1931). Anfinsen pointed 

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