Sunday, March 24, 2013

ABAC Tetrablock Terpolymers for Tough Nanoporous Filtration Membranes

Elizabeth A. Jackson, Youngmin Lee, and Marc A. Hillmyer Macromolecules, 2013,Article ASAP



This article demonstrates the use of tetrablock copolymers as thin filtration membranes. PS-PI-PS-PLa are prepared by sequential anionic polymerization followed by ring opening polymerization. These block-copolymers are spin coated onto a PES support using Toluene and a PLa homopolymer. The cylindrical PLa domains are then etched away to give 15 nm scale pores. This tetrablock approach is superior to similar ABC block-copolymer approaches in that ABC bcps often need cross linking to be sturdy enough to withstand filtration conditions. This cross linking, however, limits the flexibility of the material therefore limiting the applications. the PS-PI-PS-pore structure gives the best of both worlds in that PS is rigid and PI is flexible and no additional cross linking is required.

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