Publications Details

Engineered monodisperse mesoporous materials

Saunders, R.S.

Porous materials technology has developed products with a wide variety of pore sizes ranging from 1 angstrom to 100`s of microns and beyond. Beyond 15{angstrom} it becomes difficult to obtain well ordered, monodisperse pores. In this report the authors describe efforts in making novel porous material having monodisperse, controllable pore sizes spanning the mesoporous range (20--500 {angstrom}). They set forth to achieve this by using unique properties associated with block copolymers--two linear homopolymers attached at their ends. Block copolymers phase separate into monodisperse mesophases. They desired to selectively remove one of the phases and leave the other behind, giving the uniform monodisperse pores. To try to achieve this the authors used ring-opening metathesis polymerization to make the block copolymers. They synthesized a wide variety of monomers and surveyed their polymers by TGA, with the idea that one phase could be made thermally labile while the other phase would be thermally stable. In the precipitated and sol-gel processed materials, they determined by porosimetry measurements that micropores, mesopores, and macropores were created. In the film processed sample there was not much porosity present. They moved to a new system that required much lower thermal treatments to thermally remove over 90% of the labile phase. Film casting followed by thermal treatment and solvent extraction produced the desired monodisperse materials (based solely on SEM results). Modeling using Density Functional Theory was also incorporated into this project. The modeling was able to predict accurately the domain size and spacing vs. molecular weight for a model system, as well as accurate interfacial thicknesses.