Organic porous films with highly ordered honeycomb (HC) structures are of growing technological and scientific interest due to their wide range of potential applications, including biosensors, microreactors, scaffolds for tissue engineering, photonic band gap devices and optoelectronic devices. Breath figure (BF) technique using water droplets condensed from vapor has attracted more attentions for fabrication of HC-structured porous polymer films because of the low cost of templates, the easy removal of water droplets and the facile fabrication of large-area films. In order to produce a porous HC films with uniform structure and long-range order, polymers with branched structures and multiple chain ends, such as star polymers, represent a desired HC film material since these polymers can more easily reach high molecular weights than the linear polymers and can tolerate fluctuations of the casting conditions. Miktoarm star copolymers that contain two or more than two arm species in one star molecule represent an attractive polymer structure that combines the tunable composition of linear block copolymers with the compact structure of star polymers. Herein, we report for the first time the use of miktoarm star copolymers for producing highly ordered HC films and their application in colloidal particle separation. The miktoarm star copolymers were synthesized using ATRP technique that crosslinked two types of linear macroinitiators, polystyrene and poly(t-butyl acrylate), onto one polydivinylbenzene core. The HC films were fabricated using the breath figure technique and the pore structure was tuned with various experimental parameters, such as the solvents, the polymer concentrations, the polymer molecular weights and the substrates. Modification of the HC film surface by selective hydrolysis of the PtBA blocks changed the HC films from hydrophobic to hydrophilic. These porous films with uniform pore size and connected channels were successfully applied for separation of microparticles with different sizes.

Honeycomb-structured porous films prepared from miktoarm star copolymers

246th National Meeting (2013)

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