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Updated: May 10, 2026
Preparation of Monodomain Liquid Crystal Elastomers and Liquid Crystal Elastomer Nanocomposites
Published on: February 6, 2016
Tunable mesoporous lamellar silicas prepared using poly(ethylene oxide-b-L-lactide) and poly(ethylene-b-ethylene
Jheng-Guang Li1, Wei-Cheng Chu, Cheng-Wei Tu
1Department of Materials and Optoelectronic Science, Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung 804, Taiwan.
Abstract:
In this study, we synthesized poly(ethylene oxide-b-L-lactide) (PEO-PLLA) diblock copolymers and poly(ethylene-b-ethylene oxide-b-L-lactide) (PE-PEO-PLLA) triblock terpolymers as templates for the preparation of mesoporous lamellar silicas, possessing single, bimodal, or trimodal pore size distributions, through an evaporation-induced self-assembly (EISA) approach. As templates, we synthesized the diblock copolymers EO114LLA26 and EO114LLA130 and the triblock terpolymers E13EO42LLA26 and E13EO42LLA35 using simple ring-opening polymerization. Small-angle X-ray scattering, transmission electron microscopy, and N2 sorption measurements revealed that the mesoporous silicas displayed the morphologies of either lamellar silica walls featuring a distribution of many short cylindrical mesopores or pure lamellar structures. The morphology was greatly affected by the nature of the template (diblock or triblock copolymer) and the molecular weight of the PLLA segment in the block copolymer.
