A facile route to bespoke macro- and mesoporous block copolymer microparticles

He, Guping; Bennett, Thomas M.; Alauhdin, Mohammad; Fay, Michael W.; Liu, Xin; Schwab, Simon T.; Sun, Cheng-gong; Howdle, Steven M.

Abstract

We report a facile and versatile strategy for the bespoke fabrication of macro- and mesoporous block copolymer microparticles. A clean synthetic route, RAFT dispersion polymerisation in supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2), is used to generate block copolymer microparticles. Selective swelling/deswelling is then applied to induce controlled morphology transitions and to trap the resulting porous state. The pore sizes are controllable over a large size range (~20 – 200 nm) by varying the length of the swellable block. Through a systematic approach we then demonstrate that the shape of the pores can also be tailored from isolated spheres through to interconnected/bicontinuous channels by varying the ratio of the two blocks. This process is shown to be applicable to a range of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA)based block copolymer systems, including PMMA-b-poly(4-vinyl pyridine), PMMAb-poly(dimethyl acrylamide) (DMA) and PMMA-bpoly(dimethylaminoethylmethacrylate) (DMAEMA). In each case, the second minority block (e.g. P4VP, etc.) was selectively swollen with an alcohol to induce an order-toorder morphology transition and then quenched rapidly by the non-solvent hexane. This not only takes place on the order of hours, but is also freely scalable for the production of grams of material and beyond in a single step following polymerisation.

Citation

He, G., Bennett, T. M., Alauhdin, M., Fay, M. W., Liu, X., Schwab, S. T., …Howdle, S. M. (in press). A facile route to bespoke macro- and mesoporous block copolymer microparticles. Polymer Chemistry, 9(27), https://doi.org/10.1039/c8py00707a

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 14, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Jun 15, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jul 12, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 16, 2019
• Journal: Polymer Chemistry
• Print ISSN: 1759-9954
• Electronic ISSN: 1759-9954
• Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 27
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/c8py00707a
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/938523
• Publisher URL: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2018/PY/C8PY00707A#!divAbstract