Design and preparation of porous polymers

Porous polymers can be designed to show the advantages of high surface area and well-defined porosity. They can be produced in a molded monolithic form or in thin films, which generates significant advantages in many practical applications. Moreover, some of them can even be dissolved in a solvent and then processed directly using solvent-based techniques without destroying the porosity, which is almost impossible to imagine for other types of porous materials like activated carbons, zeolites, or porous silicas. Polymers with designed mesoporous and/or macroporous (meso-/macroporous) structure can be fabricated directly by judicious inverse replication of the structure of auxiliary preformed templates, which provides a robust way for sophisticated control over the final porous structure. The ability to tailor the intramolecular composition of block copolymers at the molecular level, by various controlled/living polymerization techniques, provides an incentive to engineer porous polymers with high molecular precision.