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tion, adhesives, lubricants, modification of surface hydrophobicity, and microfluidic
devices. Two important aspects of grafted polymers, namely the structure of mono-
layers formed by the grafted polymers and the force of interaction between two such
monolayers, are harnessed in all their applications. Modified iSAFT accurately pre-
dicts the structure of the monolayers in the absence/presence of free polymer solvent.
Then, the force of interaction between two monolayers is calculated. In particular,
the case where the segment sizes of the free and grafted polymers are different is
considered, which cannot be investigated with the previous theoretical approaches
using SCFT. The force can be either purely repulsive or have an attractive minimum
depending upon the relative chain lengths of free (TVy) and grafted (N_g) polymers.
The attractive minimum is observed only when the ratio, a = Nf∕N_g, is greater than
a critical value. A scaling relation for the critical values of a is proposed. In all
these cases, polymers are grafted to a flat surface. With recent applications of poly-
mer grafted nano-particles in nano-composites, the curvature of the grafting particles
will come into play. Hence, future developments require implementation of modified
iSAFT in 2/3 dimensions to account for the curvature effects.

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