Versatile approach to nanoporous polymers with bicontinuous morphology using metal templated synthesis

Abstract Nanoporous materials with 3-D interconnected channels and large surface areas have been known to be technologically useful for a wide spectrum of applications, particularly in the fields of energy storage and conversion, supported catalysis and separation technology. For the first time, we herein report upon an original approach to elaborate nanoporous polymers, especially thermosets, with bicontinuous morphology. The versatility of this strategy stems from the possibility of using nanoporous gold (np-Au) as a template to replicate any polymeric material. Depending on the solubility behavior of the polymer, the infiltration solution used in the step of pore filling is different, i.e. a preformed polystyrene (PS) solution or pure liquid dicyanate monomers followed by in-situ polymerization in the case of thermosetting polycyanurate (PCN). After selective and quantitative dissolution of the np-Au template in a KI/I2 solution, the resulting np-PS or np-PCN, respectively, takes the inverse morphology of np-Au, as evidenced by SEM and Fourier transform analysis. Both np-PS and np-PCN frameworks present well-defined nanostructures with a homogeneous size distribution over the entire volume of the processed samples. This new pathway is very promising not only because of its versatility in terms of polymer diversity but also for the possibility of precisely tuning the nanostructure size of the resulting nanoporous polymers.