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Invited Talk-Future Stars of AVS Session: Vapor Phase Infiltration for Transforming Polymers into Hybrid Materials: Processing Kinetics and Applications

Wednesday, October 24, 2018, 3:20 pm, Room 104B

Vapor phase infiltration (VPI) is an emerging processing technology for infusing polymers with inorganic constituents to create new organic-inorganic hybrid materials with novel chemical, electrical, optical, and/or physical properties. These new hybrid materials have demonstrated applications including chemical separations, photovoltaics, and microelectronics patterning. This talk will focus on our development of a fundamental VPI processing kinetics phenomenology to create a pathway for rational design of material composition and structure. By measuring VPI compositional profiles as a function of space or time and temperature, we can extract fundamental energy barriers for the sorption, diffusion, and reaction processes and delineate amongst different rate limiting steps. In our materials development, we often find that partial infiltration of a polymer film, fiber, or foam is sufficient to impart desired properties; so rational design of the infiltration kinetics can enable desired performance without waste in processing time or materials. Here, we will demonstrate several examples including our work to create chemically insoluble polymers and membranes. We find, for example, that infiltration depths of about 0.75 microns are sufficient to yield PMMA chemically insoluble in organic solvents regardless of whether it is in a thin film geometry or a macroscopic plexiglass object of centimeters in dimension. In PIM-1 membranes used for chemical separations, we find that we can achieve > 30 wt% inorganic loading with a single infiltration exposure. After infiltration, these membranes become stable in new separations solvents that previously swelled and/or dissolved the polymer.

(Submitted for the Future Stars of the AVS Symposium.)