Nanoporous materials are critical components in many separation, energy storage, sensing and catalysis based applications. Control of the pore size and connectivity are important factors when transport of species is required, such as Li+ for batteries. One route to provide exquisite control of these factors in porous materials is through cooperative self-assembly of precursors and a sacrificial block copolymer, in which the precursor is selectively soluble, to drive mesophase formation that provide a template for the pores on degradation of the block copolymer as shown in Figure 1.  This talk will discuss our recent efforts in block copolymer templating to produce continuous sheets of cooperatively assembled materials on plastic substrates. In most cases, we have been able to delaminate the sheets of interest and then heat to remove the block copolymer at elevated temperatures (400- 800 C) to produce well-defined mesopores.  For example, meter long sheets of Pluronic templated nickel-carbon composites (as shown in Figure 2) have been shown to exhibit ultrahigh surface areas that can exceed 3600 m2/g. In this case, the precursors are nickel nitrate, phenolic resin and tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS); the TEOS produces silica in the framework wall that can be removed by etching with NaOH to enhance the surface area. The use of the roll-to-roll method for fabrication significantly decreases the time requirements for synthesis and allows for production of tens of grams to kilograms of material. The properties of these materials will be compared to standard mesoporous powders obtained from solution phase synthesis.

Roll-to-roll fabrication of functional porous materials via cooperative assembly with block copolymers

248th National Meeting (2014)

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