Probing intermolecular and surface interactions of smart polymers

聚合物在许多工程和生物医学应用中发挥着重要作用。许多涉及聚合物的工业过程和生物医学应用依赖于它们基本的分子间和界面相互作用。在过去的三十年里，人们在理解聚合物的粘附、摩擦和润滑以及开发功能聚合物方面做了大量的努力并取得了重大进展。然而，对刺激响应或所谓的“智能”聚合物的分子间力和表面力的定量理解，特别是在可变形表面上，在复杂流体中的气泡（例如，液滴），是相当有限的，这与加拿大自然资源工业中的许多化学过程和操作高度相关。（例如矿物浮选、沥青提取、油砂生产中的水力运输、尾矿水处理）。

Polymers play important roles in numerous engineering and biomedical applications. Many industrial processes and biomedical applications where polymers are involved rely on their fundamental intermolecular and interfacial interactions. Over the past three decades, much effort and significant progress has been made in understanding the adhesion, friction and lubrication of polymers and development of functional polymers. Yet, the quantitative understanding of the intermolecular and surface forces of stimuli-responsive or so-called “smart” polymers, particularly at deformable surfaces (e.g. bubbles, liquid droplets) in complex fluids, is rather limited, which is highly related to many chemical processes and operations in the natural resources industries of Canada (e.g. mineral flotation, bitumen extraction, hydrotransport in oil sands production, tailings water treatment).