Recent work has highlighted the role that coatings and substrates with topographically patterned features will play in technologies for harvesting and transmitting light energy efficiently. In order to address these important applications, we are developing a set of methodologies for prescribing height profiles in polymer films. This is accomplished by photochemcially patterning surface energy gradients into the solid state film. After heating the film above its glass transition temperature, melt-state flow is triggered and directed by the surface energy pattern, as defined by the Marangoni effect.Since commercial solar cells and light emitting diodes contain multilayered components, we seek to demonstrate here that features formed by our process are thermochemically stable and can act as an underlayer in a multilayered film. We have doped two different photosensitizers into a polymer film and activated them sequentially using an appropriate set of optical filters. The first is responsible for generating the surface energy pattern and the second is used to crosslink the film. To exemplify the multilayer capabilities, a diblock copolymer (BCP) was spin coated directly onto the crosslinked features, which influenced the BCP thickness such that the macroscopic self-assembly of parallel-oriented microdomains was guided.

Generating thermochemically stable, topographically patterned polymer films via sequentially-activated photochemistries

247th National Meeting (2014)

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