One-pot approach to fabrication of porous polymers from Pickering emulsion templates

Abstract

We demonstrate a simple, versatile one-pot approach for the preparation of particle stabilised soft templates and macroporous polymer materials from them. This approach allows for the rapid fabrication (in a few minutes rather than hours) of large amounts of Pickering emulsion templates by performing the synthesis of mineral nanoparticle stabilisers (e.g. CaCO3) and the emulsification in-one-go in a very efficient way. It is shown that by using suitable formulations a variety of emulsion templates with a range of monomers can be fabricated and solidified to produce macroporous materials with closed-cell, open-cell or hierarchical pore architectures. Due to its versatility and scalability, this approach could be potentially used for the production of macroporous materials for research and diverse industrial applications.