General Features of Liquid Crystalline Block Copolymers

4 General Features of Liquid Crystalline Block Copolymers 

Liquid crystallinity and block microphase separation both compete during the minimization of free energy of the system. As we will show later in this review, in the case of a rod-coil diblock copolymer, liquid crystallinity plays a very important role in the microphase separation process and leads to morphologies distinctly different from the conventional spheres, cylinders and lamellar microstructures and include the arrow head, zig-zag, and wavy lamellae phases [40, 41], In the case of SGLC-coil 

LC and Rubbery Coll Glassy Coil Isotropic LCPs (coil-coil)  

Microphase separation Competes with Mesophase formation (solvent evaporation) 

In order to study the detailed behavior of LC block copolymers, it would be ideal to create monodispersed LC-BCP samples with well defined architecture for each block over a wide range of molecular weights. LC-BCP systems with narrow polydisper-sity should form well-ordered microdomain structures while LC-BCPs with broad molecular weight distributions would probably not. Synthesis of such materials still remains a challenge. 

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