Fabrication of nanotextured porous polymer using porous silicon scaffolds

Abstract

Porous polymers are gaining increased interest in several areas due to their large surface area and unique physiochemical properties. Porous polymers are conventionally manufactured using specific processes related to the chemical structure of each polymer. In this paper, we report a generic fabrication process that can be applied to all liquid polymers to texture their outer surfaces with a desired porosity. The process is based on two micromolding steps. Porous silicon (ps) template, fabricated using a xenon difluoride (XeF2) dry etching technique, is used in the first step to form a polymeric complement (pc) of porous silicon. Pc, in turn, is used as template to form the final porous polymer. This leads to a final polymeric structure similar to the porous silicon one. The proposed process offers flexibility in terms of tailoring the texture of the final polymer by simply using porous silicon templates with different pore sizes and configurations. The proposed process was successfully implemented to texture Poly-ethyl hydrosiloxane (PMHS) using porous silicon and Poly-methyl methacrylate (PMMA) scaffolds.