Full text: Unavailable
We investigate a wetting reversal transition in thin films of two-phase mixtures of poly(ethylene-propylene) (PEP) and its deuterated analogue (dPEP) on a substrate covered by a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) whose surface energy, γSAM, is tuned by varying the SAM composition. As γSAM increases from 21 to 24 mJ/m2, a transition from a three-layer (air/dPEP/PEP/dPEP/SAM) to a two-layer (air/dPEP/PEP/SAM) structure occurs at increasing Tc - T, where Tc and T are the critical and transition temperatures, respectively. As the system structure changes from three-layer to two-layer, the thicknesses of the dPEP-rich wetting layers at the air/mixture and mixture/SAM interfaces are found to smoothly increase and decrease, respectively, while the thickness of the PEP-rich layer (ca. one half of the total film thickness) does not change. The dependence of the transition temperature on γSAM is predicted by a simple model using the experimental data on the surface energies of PEP/dPEP and estimates of the interfacial energy between PEP and dPEP.