Multicompartment Cubosomes with Tunable Internal Structure for Catalysis Applications

Basic data for this project

Description

Polymer cubosomes represent organic microparticles with highly ordered nanochannels giving this type of morphology a number of attractive properties including very high specific surface area, tunable pore size and shape, as well as mechanical stability. The high surface area of ​​cubosomes can provide a large number of active sites, which led them to their recognition as promising materials for surface or interface-related applications, eg, absorption, energy storage and catalysis. The tunable pore size (water channel) and shape allow to control the accessibility for species to the active sites. However, research on polymer cubosomes began only recently and reports on their formation and applications are still rather few.There has been no report on compartmentalized cubosomes before, ie polymer cubosomes with a nanostructure in the wall (eg core shell, sphere-on-the-wall, cylinder-on-the-wall, gydoidal). In addition, catalysis in polymer micelles is a fruitful field, but the potential of cubosomes has not been harvested yet. The overall goal of this work is thus to generate the first multicompartment cubosomes from block copolymers (ABC triblock terpolymer in particular) and develop a platform technology for polymer cubosome catalysis.