Synthesis and Alignment of Nanostructured Materials Using Liquid Crystals - Self-Assembled Supramolecular Architectures: Lyotropic Liquid Crystals - page 198

Figure 7.6 Illustration to show that the fi nal porous structures are an almost perfect
1 : 1 to the original block copolymer mesophase (a negative image), where on the left
there is the lyotropic phase and on the right the corresponding silica. [Adapted from
Hentze et al., (1999) .]

Figure 7.7 TEM image of mesoporous silica obtained from poly(butadiene- b - ethyl-
ene oxide) (PB

PEO) block copolymer templates illustrating the unusual bicontinuous
spongelike L 3 phase (Förster et al., 2001).

−

Figure 7.7 presents the replica of the L 3 spongelike phase, which is usually
not found in the traditional phase diagrams of block copolymers (Förster
et al., 2001). The sponge phase exhibits a multiply connected, bicontinuous
disordered phase without long-range order, yet with a well-defi ned character-
istic length of 160 nm, which is related to an average unit cell size.

7.2.2.2 Reverse Templating The inner structure (channels) of the reverse
LC phases can also be used to produce an ordered array of nanoparticles,