Abstract
Porous polymers are gaining increased interest in several areas due, in great part, to their large surface area and unique physiochemical properties. Porous polymers are conventionally manufactured using specific processes related to the chemical structure of each polymer. With the wide variety of porous polymers that have been designed, fabricated, and tested to date, this review aims to provide an overview of the advances and recent progress in the preparation processes and fabrication techniques. A detailed comparison between these techniques is also provided. Some of these techniques offer the advantage of controlling the porosity and the possibility to obtain porous 3D polymers. A new generic fabrication process that can be applied to all liquid polymers to texture their outer surfaces with a desired porosity is also presented. The proposed process, which is based on two micromolding steps, offers flexibility in terms of tailoring the texture of the final polymer by simply using porous silicon templates with different pore sizes and configurations. The anticipated process was successfully implemented to texture polyethyl hydrosiloxane (PMHS) using porous silicon and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) scaffolds.
Highlights
Porous polymers are gaining increased interest in several areas due, in great part, to their large surface area and unique physiochemical properties
With the wide variety of porous polymers that have been designed, fabricated, and tested to date, this review aims to provide an overview of the advances and recent progress in the preparation processes and fabrication techniques
Macroporous gels are used for isolation of small molecules from the solutions containing suspended materials, monolithic macroporous polymers are employed as chromatographic matrices, macroporous beads are used in chromatographic separation of plasmid DNA, and macroporous polymeric scaffolds are engaged in tissue engineering applications [23]
Summary
For the sake of understanding the motives behind the interest in porous materials in general and in porous polymers, one must first comprehend the inherent significance of the presence of these pores in polymers and how these pores qualify polymers to be excellent candidates for a wide variety of applications nowadays. With the use of polymers, large membrane areas of different shapes can be made with reasonable costs and various versatile fabrication techniques [4] Another prominent field where porous polymers are starting to be indispensable is the field of tissue engineering [5,6,7,8]. The approaches that are adopted in tissue engineering for the purpose of fulfilling the previously mentioned aims include planting cells inside the body, supplying the tissue with factors encouraging its growth, and locating cells on or embedding them within matrices The latter approach is the most popular when it comes to tissue engineering as it uses natural or synthetic extracellular substrates as place on which living cells are implanted.
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