Development of new fabrication techniques for generating porous membranes have gained much interest due to the control offered over structure, porosity, and chemical functionality that can be tailored for various applications. Here we introduce a solventless process for the fabrication of functional polymer coatings with controlled morphologies. In our system, porous polymer membranes are fabricated by vapor deposition of monomer vapor as solid microstructure followed by polymerization with a vapor phase initiator and subsequent sublimation of the unreacted monomer. This process results in dual-scale porosity membranes where large scale pores are controlled by the deposition temperature and the small scale pores are controlled by the sublimation of the unreacted monomer. In this talk, we will demonstrate that we can synthesize hydrophilic poly(methacrylic acid-co-ethylene glycol diacrylate) porous membranes with controlled morphologies and thicknesses to be used as hydrogel supports for the fabrication of giant lipid vesicles using the hydrogel-assisted rehydration method (Movsesian et al., Langmuir,34, 2018). Zwitterionic and charged lipid mixtures are applied on hydrogel membranes as thin lipid films and subsequently swollen in an aqueous hydration buffer. Here we show that vesicle yield and size are controlled by the physicochemical properties of the hydrogel substrate such as morphology, density, and charge of the polymer. Our findings show that high hydrogel porosity and reduced electrostatic interactions between the polymer and the lipid are preferred for vesicle formation. The effect of morphology on surface properties of the porous polymers are further investigated by studying the wetting behavior of porous membranes that were coated with a hydrophobic polymer film using initiated chemical vapor deposition.

Deposition of porous membranes with controlled morphology and chemical functionality for fabrication of giant vesicles

2019 Spring National Meeting

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