Polymeric nanoporous materials fabricated with supercritical CO2 and CO2-expanded liquids

Abstract

Both academia and industries have put great efforts into developing non-destructive technologies for the fabrication of polymeric nanoporous materials. Such non-destructive technologies developed with supercritical CO₂ (scCO₂) and CO₂-expanded liquids (CXLs) have been attracting more and more attention because they have been demonstrated to be green and effective media for porous polymer preparation and processing. In this tutorial review, we present several such new technologies with scCO₂ and CXLs, which have the capacity to prepare polymeric nanoporous materials with unique morphologies. The fabricated nanoporous polymers have significantly improved the performance of polymeric monoliths and films, and have found wide applications as templates, antireflection coatings, low-k materials, tissue engineering scaffolds and filtration membranes. This tutorial review also introduces the associated characterization methods, including the imaging, scattering and physisorption techniques.