Multicompartment micelles have advanced applications in biological and pharmaceutical fields. The self-assembly of the block copolymers with different chain architectures provides versatile and powerful routes to obtain multicompartment micelles in water. Here we apply the dissipative particle dynamics method to study the self-assembly of H-shaped triblock copolymers in a selective solvent. It is found that the H-shaped triblock copolymers can form micelles with different morphologies, such as worm-like micelles, hamburger micelles, core-shell-corona micelles, and cylinder micelles, etc. Among them, the cylinder micelles have not been reported before in the case of the copolymers with similar chain architecture (e.g., Y-shaped copolymer). We demonstrate a convenient approach to obtain different morphologies by only adjusting the arrangement of the copolymers' blocks. These results may be helpful for the design of multicompartment micelles for various application purposes.
Dissipative particle dynamics for directed self-assembly of block copolymers
