Applications of Quartz Crystal Microbalance in Polymer Studies

In this review, the authors introduce the brief history, basic principles, sample preparation, and applications of quartz crystal microbalance (QCM). With the development of QCM technique, the quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCM-D) has been employed to carry out the studies in a wide range of fields of polymer films because it can simultaneously obtain the information on the changes in mass and stiffness of polymer films. Moreover, the combined QCM-D and spectroscopic ellipsometry (QCM-D/SE) technique can be used to further obtain the thickness change and other information of polymer films. To demonstrate the applications of QCM-D in polymer studies, this review presents how the QCM-D and QCM-D/SE can be used to study the conformational behaviors of polymers grafted at interfaces, the ionic effects on polymers, and the polymeric marine antifouling materials. Specifically, (i) QCM-D can be used to study both the conformational behaviors of grafted polymers during the pancake-to-brush and mushroom-to-brush transitions and the stimuli-responsive behaviors of grafted polymers with temperature, pH, and salt concentration as the external stimuli; (ii) QCM-D/SE can be applied to study the ionic effects on polyelectrolyte brushes including specific ion effects, ionic hydrogen bond effects, and ionic hydrophilicity/hydrophobicity effects. The relevant studies can not only clarify the mechanisms of the ionic effects on polyelectrolyte brushes, but also demonstrate that the properties of polyelectrolyte brushes can be tuned with these ionic effects; (iii) QCM-D can be employed to evaluate the performance of polymeric marine antifouling materials, providing a method to screen the materials in laboratory, saving much time and money for marine field tests. The authors hope that this review can provide an inspiration on how to apply QCM-D to carry out polymer studies, enabling this technique to solve more problems in the field of polymers.