ADVANCES IN PATTERN POLYMER NANOSTRUCTURES AND INNOVATIVE APPLICATIONS

CARMEN MIJANGOS; IWONA BLASZCZYK LEZAK; BELEN SANZ; JUAN M. GIUSSI; REBECA HERNANDEZ

Roma

Conferencia; IXth ECNP International Conference on Nanostructured Polymers and Nanocomposites; 2016

European Center of Nanostructured Polymers

Template assisted fabrication methods can provide a hub of polymer nanostructured architectures (or combined metallic&organic nanostructures) and miniatured devices, playing an increasingly important role in emerging applications. Challenges in nanotechnology applications require both specific chemical functions and structures assessed by polymers and easy manufacturing of polymers in the nanoscale provided by template assisted methods. The versatility of anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) templates and replication methods is the relevant advantage in the rapid development of innovative applications. In the last few years two equally important strategies were followed, i) the control over homogeneity, periodicity, and dimension of the AAO template and ii) the development of fast and simple procedures to replicate the nanocavities of template by polymer infiltration methods, either from melt or solution. Moreover, recent advances were addressed to in-situ polymerization methods that allowed the straightforward preparation of polymer nanostructures from monomers. A system that fulfills the requirement of a precision nanoreactor is the nanocavities AAO templates. Therefore, one-step polymerization into the porous of AAO nanocavities has opened new opportunities to direct fabrication of polymer nanostructures or nanostructured surfaces with controlled properties, by selecting the appropriate monomer, AAO dimensions and manipulation strategy. While infiltration methods do not change the chemical characteristics of the precursor polymer or copolymer, ie, their composition, stereoregularity or molecular weight, in-situ polymerization requires a previous study of polymerization kinetics as it could be affected by confinement effects. Recently, a mathematical model that describes effects of nanoconfinement on the polymerization kinetics was derived for the radical polymerization of a fluorinated acrylic monomer in the AAO nanocavities.With the aid of both strategies, nanomoulding and nanopolymerization, we have produced a portafolio of nanostructured polymer that combine functionality and shape. The list include not only electrical conducting or magnetic polymer nanostructures but superhydrophobic or biomimetic nanostructured surfaces, among others. In this work, we report the last experimental procedures developed in the laboratory to obtain, i) core-shell polymer-polymer nanostructures by the combination of a sequential infiltration process; ii) core-shell metallic-polymer nanostructures by the combination of electrochemical and chemical routes. Both experiments share the infiltration of a hard thermoplastic polymer in AAO templates leading to polymer nanotubes and iii) scalable and shape adjusted polymer surfaces. The surface properties could be modulated by combination of a post modification LbL treatment. This kind of ?patterned? surfaces can provided potential applications in biomedicine, and others fields.