Application of such cylindrical pore arrays as templates for polymer nanofabrication is demonstrated.
In order to remove the entrapped template, different methods were applied: electrodesorption conditions performed by cyclic voltammetry (oxidation reduction of the template in polymer), the use of such strong solvents interacts with polymer and causing coating swelling necessary for the template release.
Due to the higher surface energy inherited by the porous alumina template, the wetting of polymer solution onto the cavity's wall can be realized.
Consequently, the preliminary experiments referenced above also confirmed our results that it is possible and absolutely appropriate to reduce the amount of template in the polymer recipe.
The factors which have been studied are molar concentration ratio of sodium hydroxide and zinc acetate, amount of polymer templates and molecular weight of polymer templates.
Both the MPS and colloidal silica nanoparticles are produced by almost similar synthetic conditions, except the use of polymer template for MPS.
Silica particles were obtained by calcination and removal of polymer template from the polymer silica nanocomposite being the product of swelling of pure polymer in silica precursor.
For example, templates of crosslinked polymers or inorganic materials can be employed without removal of the template to enable solid/solid composites, for applications such as PnBG tuning.
As for the "hard" template approaches, the suitable rod-like objects were used as templates for the polymerization and growth of polymer films, followed by template dissolution.
Cross-sectional SEM images of the pristine and the SHI-irradiated TiO2 films are illustrated in Figure 4. Figure 4b suggests that the pristine ESD TiO2 layer has nano-aggregates and an inhomogeneous interface (contact) with the FTO layer, mostly due to the removal of polymer templates from ESD coating during sintering treatment.
At this final stage, the different reaction kinetics (regarding rates of reactions of different orders of magnitude expected for the diffusion and binding of the template to the polymer) can be investigated by using the probability-weighted dynamic Monte Carlo method [38].
