Spiral and Mesoporous Block Polymer Nanofibers Generated in Confined Nanochannels

Abstract

Spiral-like or various porous polymer nanofibers have great applications in biosensor, bioengineering, and template-fabrication of functional inorganic materials. However, the fabrication of polymer nanostructures with controllable porous or spiral morphology in one process is a big challenge. Here we first demonstrated a general and easy method to generate spiral or porous block copolymer (BCP) nanofibers by using geometric confinement of nanochannels to disturb the self-assembly of BCP while nonsolvent is induced into BCP solution. Continuous spiral polymer nanofibers and polymer nanofibers with hierarchical porous nanostructures can be easily generated within channels of anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) membranes by tuning the composition and concentration of BCP. This study first reports the influence of cylinder confinement to the arrangement of BCP micelles. These spiral and porous BCP nanostructures are not only good templates to generate functional inorganic nanostructures, but also promising candidates to create biosensors or to load catalyst because their enlarged surface area enables high guest concentrations.

A review on the progress of polymer nanostructures with modulated morphologies and properties, using nanoporous AAO templates

“…Lee et al showed that pore modulations originated from self-induced current oscillations may be an starting point to create a well-defined 3D porous structure at a local scale [110]. Russell's [58,[131][132][133][134][135][136]; J. T. Chen's [45,137,138]; Z. Jin´s [139][140][141][142]; J. Lee´s [143]; J. Wang´s [144]; Marsal´s [145]; and more recently, by our group [71,100,[146][147][148][149][150][151][152][153][154][155][156] among other groups that will be mentioned along this section.…”

Replication of Mesoscale Pore One-dimensional Nanostructures: Surface-induced Phase Separation of Polystyrene/Poly(vinyl alcohol) (PS/PVA) Blends

“…Furthermore, similar polymer phase separations and transformation behaviors at the microscale have also been observed [34,35,36,37,38]. Because of the success of the AAO templating method, many publications have explored various AAO applications such as thermal and physical properties of polymer nanostructures under nanoconfinement conditions, fabrication of higher−order nanostructures, polymerization and crystallization in AAO templates, and the double infiltration nanoencapsulation process [39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49].…”

Chiral transfer‐dictated self‐assembly of chiral block copolymers

“…In a comparison, notwithstanding similar chiral structures could be observed from the selfassembly of achiral BCPs, it is usually challenging to achieve a preferred chirality. [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] Due to these interesting phenomena and the remaining challenges in BCP* self-assembly, it is of great emergency to retrospect the development of BCP* self-assembly and pinpoint the recent progress, which may be helpful for the future research in this field.…”