Understanding on the Surfactants Engineered Morphology Evolution of Block Copolymer Particles and Their Precise Mesoporous Silica Replicas

Surfactant-directed block copolymer(BCP) particles have gained intensive attention owing to their attractive morphologies and ordered domains. However, their controllable fabrication suffers several limitations including complex design and synthesis of multiple surfactant systems, limited choices of block copolymers, and time-consuming post-processes, etc. Herein, a surfactant size-dependent phase separation route is proposed to precisely manipulate the architectures of the anionic block copolymer particles in the binary co-assembly system of BCP and surfactants. In the system of polystyrene block polyacrylic acid (PS-b-PAA) and quaternary ammonium surfactants, it is verified that facile control on the ordered phase separation structures and morphologies of BCP particles can be achieved via simply varying the alkyl lengths of the surfactants. The cationic surfactants are demonstrated participating in the fabrication of the internal structures of BCP particles. Especially, it is found that the cationic surfactants are integrate into the anionic polyacrylic acid(PAA) domain of BCP particles of PS-b-PAA to influence the volume fraction of PAA blocks, so that varied architectures of BCP particles are constructed. Based on these understandings, spherical or ellipsoidal BCP particles are obtained as expected, as well as their precisely inorganic mesoporous silica replicas through the block copolymer nanoparticle replicating route. More interestingly, the ellipsoidal mesoporous silica exhibits higher cellular internalization capability due to its lower energy expenditure during the internalization process, which presents promising potentials in biomedical applications, especially for high-efficient drug delivery systems. These findings may provide valuable insights into the confinement assembly of anionic block copolymers and the creation of special nanocarriers for high-efficiency biomacromolecule delivery in the biomedical community.