Confinement effects on polymer crystallization: From droplets to alumina nanopores

We review previous works on polymer confined crystallization employing strategies that allow confinement to go from the micron to the nanometer scale: droplets, blends, block copolymers and infiltration into alumina nanopores. We also present novel results, reporting homogeneous nucleation and first order crystallization kinetics, for the first time, in a homopolymer and a diblock copolymer infiltrated within alumina nanopores. Confinement can produce fractionated crystallization or exclusive crystallization at much higher supercoolings as compared to bulk polymers, as the degree of confinement increases. For highly confined heterogeneity free micro or nano-domains, the overall crystallization kinetics is dominated by nucleation and therefore becomes first order. The nucleation mechanism changes from heterogeneous nucleation for the bulk polymer to surface or homogeneous nucleation for ensembles of confined and isolated heterogeneity free micro or nanodomains. Surface nucleation is more commonly found than homogenous nucleation, although this fact is not frequently recognized in the literature.