Design and Applications of Multiscale Organic-Inorganic Hybrid Materials Derived from Block Copolymer Self-Assembly

Block copolymer (BCP) self-assembly (SA) is a useful tool for designing materials with tunable nanostructure as well as controllable multiscale, hierarchical structure. A combination of BCP SA with inorganic materials results in functional hybrid materials with ordered structures down to the nanoscale, thereby exploiting both the advantageous features of structure tunability from BCP SA and functionality from inorganic materials. Rather than a comprehensive review of the entire field of hybrid materials, this overview summarizes a variety of BCP-derived synthetic approaches developed over the last 10-15 years, with emphasis on work by the Wiesner group at Cornell University on hybrid materials with structural characteristics on multiple length scales. This encompasses hybrids with thermodynamic equilibrium-type BCP nanostructures, controlled nonequilibrium-type structure formation processes leading to structural asymmetries, as well as formation of hierarchical BCP materials with control over nanoscale and macroscale structures. Besides the development of wet-chemical methodologies for their synthesis, this overview also features some promising first applications of such materials. Results suggest that BCP SA directed synthetic approaches may provide routes to cost-effective and large-scale materials fabrication potentially useful for both, new materials discovery and study of fundamental structure - property correlations as well as exploration of the materials in a number of today's most pressing applications including water filtration and energy conversion and storage.