Porous materials derived from block copolymers are of significant interest for addressing environmental and sustainability challenges. Although numerous etching strategies for polylactide (PLA) have been developed, demonstrations to date are limited by slow etch rates that require as long as 7 to 10 days for etching of few-mm thick films. We have developed a significantly faster etching strategy that takes less than 1 day to fully etch 2 mm thick films. Specifically, aqueous trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) enables an etch rate of 14 nm/s. The technique has been applied to generate porous polymer templates with lamellar, gyroid and hexagonal morphologies as confirmed by SAXS, GISAXS, and SEM. These advances lower the cost to produce porous polymers at larger scales to enable the development of porous templates that are used in catalysis, sensing, energy harvesting, storage and separations.

Robust porous polymers enabled by rapid TFA-etch with improved selectivity for polylactide

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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