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Interconnected macroporous polymers can be made by polymerisation of emulsion templates consisting of an aqueous phase and a monomer phase (typically styrene and divinylbenzene) in which the aqueous (internal) phase is in the form of drops and the monomer phase is the continuous phase between the drops. Until recently it was thought that interconnected macroporous polymers could only be produced from the polymerisation of high internal phase emulsion (HIPE) templates with an internal phase level exceeding 74 vol%. Improvement of the poor mechanical performance, characteristic of such macroporous polymers, was achieved simply by increasing the material density of the macroporous polymer. However, this required a reduction in the internal phase volume of the emulsion template. Polymerisation of the continuous organic phase of emulsion templates with an internal phase volume ranging from 84 vol% to 70 vol% resulted in the production of poly(merised)HIPEs, polymerisation of medium internal phase emulsions with internal phase volume ranging from 70 vol% to 30 vol% in polyMIPEs and polymerisation of a low internal phase emulsion with an internal phase volume of 25 vol% in a polyLIPE. The resulting macroporous polymers were characterised in terms of mechanical and structural properties as well as gas and mercury permeability. Compression tests show that mechanical properties improved as the material density was increased. Gas and mercury permeability measurements show that as the internal phase volume of the emulsion template is reduced, the permeability of the resultant macroporous polymer is also reduced. However, surprisingly even macroporous polymers produced from low internal phase emulsion templates (25 vol%) were permeable with a gas permeability of 2.6 Â 10 À14 m 2 indicating that polyLIPEs are still interconnected macroporous polymers. Reconstruction modelling of the transport properties of porous materials shows that the permeability of a porous material with similar structures to that of the macroporous polymers increases exponentially with the porosity.

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This paper is focused on the fundamental mechanism(s) of viscoelastic turbulence that leads to polymer-induced turbulent drag reduction phenomenon. A great challenge in this problem is the computation of viscoelastic turbulent flows, since the understanding of polymer physics is restricted to mechanical models. An effective state-of-the-art numerical method to solve the governing equation for polymers modeled as nonlinear springs, without using any artificial assumptions as usual, was implemented here on a three-dimensional channel flow geometry. The capability of this algorithm to capture the strong polymer-turbulence dynamical interactions is depicted on the results, which are much closer qualitatively to experimental observations. This allowed a more detailed study of the polymer-turbulence interactions, which yields an enhanced picture on a mechanism resulting from the polymer-turbulence energy transfers.