Nanostructured Hydrogels via Photopolymerization in Lyotropic Liquid Crystalline Systems

Much research has focused on the control of material structure on the nanometer size scale. The self assembled, highly organized solutions inherent to lyotropic liquid crystals (LLCs) have recently emerged as promising tools in the synthesis of organic nanostructured materials. In this work highly ordered LLC morphologies have been utilized as polymerization templates to dictate and achieve unique polymer network structure. The influence of nanoscale organization of the monomer is directly related to the physical and diffusive behavior of the resulting polymer. Additionally, LLC ordered solutions have shown great promise in compatibilizing blends of immiscible monomers. To this end, the precise organization of the LLC has been investigated as a means to segregate immiscible monomers into isolated nanoscale domains for the copolymerization of two separate but interconnected networks. The results from this study have demonstrated that the network structure of PEGDA hydrogels or PEGDA/HDDA blends can be directed by LLC templates, and that the physical properties of the templated materials are indeed influenced by the network structure induced by the templating process. This work has established that LLCs are an important tool in the creation of materials with nanoscopic architecture that directly leads to attractive and previously unattainable materials properties.