It is a great challenge to produce nanoporous polymeric membranes with a simultaneous control over the porosity and functionality (surface chemistry), while maintaining appropriate mechanical properties and a good chemical stability. There is a need to obtain such functional porous systems by simple and highly reproducible approaches, being cost-effective and compatible with the production of materials at an industrial scale. Much progress toward engineering porous polymers with controlled morphology has recently been achieved using a large variety of synthetic strategies. Miscellaneous routes are now applied by selectively removing single polymer domains acting as porogen templates from various macromolecular architectures, e.g. supramolecular structures, polymer blends, as well (semi-) Interpenetrating Polymer Networks (IPNs). Furthermore, block copolymers develop well-defined equilibrium domain morphologies (i.e. alternating lamellae, hexagonally close- packed cylinders, bicontinuous gyroid, and body-centered cubic spheres, in linear diblock copolymers), and thus constitute arguably ideal nanostructured precursors for the formation of ordered mesoporous polymers. In this context, the selective degradation of the sacrificial minority block from self-organized block copolymers has proven to be a very prolific approach to a wide array of nanoporous materials with defined porosity.
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