CHAPTER 8
 CONCLUSIONS AND PERSPECTIVES

 In this dissertation, the investigations on the A/W interfacial behavior of various block

copolymers in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, as well as the synthesis and characterization of nanoparticles

for drug detoxification purposes in Chapters 6 and 7 were presented.

 As discussed in Chapter 3, the PS-b-PtBA dendrimer-like block copolymer aggregated into

circular surface micelles for low surface pressures before collapsing around 24 mN/m. The PS-b-

PAA dendrimer-like block copolymer formed stable Langmuir monolayers only under acidic

conditions and aggregated into circular surface micelles at low pressure, before aqueous

dissolution of the PAA segments followed by aggregation of the micellar PS cores took place

around 5 mN/m. The aggregation numbers for both dendrimer-like block copolymers were

estimated around 3-5 dendrimer-like block copolymers per circular surface micelle. These rather

low values compared to the results reported in the previous literature for other architectures and

chain lengths confirmed the tremendous influence of molecular architecture on the 2D surface

micelle formation of block copolymers.

 As discussed in Chapter 4, the interfacial behavior of PEO-b-PCL block copolymers was,

similarly as for PS-b-PtBA and PS-b-PAA block copolymers, also strongly dependent on the

architecture. For the PEO-b-PCL five-arm stars, only one phase transition around 13-14 mN/m

corresponding to collapse and crystallization of the PCL segments was observed, whereas two

additional PEO-related phase transitions (aqueous dissolution at 6.5 mN/m and brush formation

at 10.5 mN/m) could be observed for the linear samples. Therefore, while the work presented in

Chapters 3 and 4 gave some hint of the interesting interfacial properties of these block

copolymers, additional investigations on other samples with different architectures and chain

lengths are necessary for a better fundamental understanding of the influence of block copolymer