The Crystallization of Polymers and Copolymers within Nanoporous Templates

4 The Crystallization of Polymers and Copolymers within Nanoporous Templates 

Masuda and Fukuda were the first to prepare AAO templates by a double anodization process [217]. After the first 

The infiltration of a polymeric material into the nanopores of the AAO templates can be achieved by different methods. Melt infiltration has been extensively employed, where a polymer film is placed on top of the pores and heated above its melting point. The molten polymer fills the pores after some time has elapsed (for detailed information on the filling process, see Ref. [218]). This infiltration process is 

The crystallization of infiltrated polymers within AAO templates has been recently studied [190-204,224-226]. We can extract some general trends from a review of the literature  

The crystallization temperature (T ) has been found to decrease with pore size. Woo et al. [197] infiltrated linear polyethylene (PE) in AAO templates. Several pore sizes were studied, from 15 to llOnm, and even though a clear decreasing trend with pore size diameter was found, the crystallization temperatures found were too high to correspond to homogeneous nucleation of PE (see [92,97,100,112,200]). The nucleation of the confined PE nanocylinders must have been produced by surface nucleation. Similar results of decreasing with pore size have been reported for infiltrated PP [190], PEO [227,200, 202], and PE-b-PS [200] diblock copolymers. 

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