Homeotropic Self-Alignment of Discotic Liquid Crystals for Nanoporous Polymer Films
Nanostructured polymer films with continuous, membrane-spanning pores from polymerizable hexagonal columnar discotic liquid crystals (LCs) were fabricated. A robust alignment method was developed to obtain homeotropic alignment of columns between glass surfaces by adding a small amount of a tri(eth...
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Veröffentlicht in: | ACS nano 2018-07, Vol.12 (7), p.6714-6724 |
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Hauptverfasser: | , , , |
Format: | Artikel |
Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | Nanostructured polymer films with continuous, membrane-spanning pores from polymerizable hexagonal columnar discotic liquid crystals (LCs) were fabricated. A robust alignment method was developed to obtain homeotropic alignment of columns between glass surfaces by adding a small amount of a tri(ethylene glycol) modified analogue of the mesogen as a dopant that preferentially wets glass. The homeotropic LC alignment was fixated via a photoinitiated free radical copolymerization of a high-temperature tolerant trisallyl mesogen with a divinyl ester. Removal of the hydrogen-bonded template from the aligned columns afforded a nanoporous network with pores of nearly 1 nm in diameter perpendicular to the surface, and without noticeable collapse of the nanopores. The effect of pore orientation was demonstrated by an adsorption experiment in which homeotropic film showed a threefold increase in the initial uptake rate of methylene blue compared to planarly aligned films. |
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ISSN: | 1936-0851 1936-086X 1936-086X |
DOI: | 10.1021/acsnano.8b01822 |