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POLYMER SCIENCE    

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10118-020-2431-9 Chinese J. Polym. Sci.

Homeotropic Alignment and Selective Adsorption of Nanoporous Polymer Film Polymerized from Hydrogen-bonded Liquid Crystal An-Qi Xiao, Xiao-Lin Lyu, Hong-Bing Pan, Zhe-Hao Tang, Wei Zhang, Zhi-Hao Shen*, and Xing-He Fan* Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Key Laboratory of Polymer Chemistry and Physics of Ministry of Education, Center for Soft Matter Science and Engineering, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

 Electronic Supplementary Information Abstract   Nanoporous polymer film with a hexagonal columnar (Colh) structure was fabricated by templated hydrogen-bonding discotic liquid crystals containing methacrylate functional group. The supramolecular hydrogen-bonded complex T3Ph-L is composed of a 1,3,5-tris(1Hbenzo[d]imidazol-2-yl)benzene (T3Ph) core molecule as the hydrogen-bonding acceptor and 3,4,5-tris((11-(methacryloyloxy)undecyl)oxy)benzoic acid (L) peripheral molecules as donors. And the Colh structure is always retained after self-assembly, photo-crosslinking, and removal of the template T3Ph. The nanoporous polymer film can retain the Colh phase even under the dry condition, which indicates more possibilities for practical applications. After chemical modification of the inner wall of the nanopores, the nanoporous polymer film with pores of about 1 nm selectively adsorbs ionic dyes, and the adsorption process is spontaneous and exothermic in nature. Homeotropic alignment can be obtained when the blend complex was sandwiched between two modified glasses after annealing by slow cooling, which shows that the nanoporous polymer film has potential in applications such as nanofiltration. Keywords   Liquid crystal; Hydrogen bonding; Homeotropic alignment; Nanoporous polymer film; Selective adsorption Citation: Xiao, A. Q.; Lyu, X. L.; Pan, H. B.; Tang, Z. H.; Zhang, W.; Shen, Z. H.; Fan, X. H. Homeotropic alignment and selective adsorption of nanoporous polymer film polymerized from hydrogen-bonded liquid crystal. Chinese J. Polym. Sci. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10118-020-2431-9

 

INTRODUCTION Nanoporous films have been explored for many years because of their broad application prospects.[1,2] Their excellent mechanical properties, easy processability, large specific surface areas, and well-defined porosity are desirable for practical applications.[3] Many efforts have been made on utilizing selfassembled block polymers (BCPs) to create aligned nanoporous morphology.[4−7] Nevertheless, the pore size is difficult to be controlled to be lower than 10 nm in this approach, which has limited the applications of BCP-based nanoporous polymer films, such as nanofiltration.[8−11] Another approach involving the self-assembly and crosslinking of hydrogen-bonded discotic liquid crystals followed by removing the template has the advantages of intrinsically small size (with periodic sizes of a few nm) and inherent exact size distribution, which are crucial in