Synthesis of open porous emulsion-templated monoliths using cetyltrimethylammonium bromide

In recent years, open porous materials (polyHIPEs) have attracted more and more attention because of their specific properties and applications in biological tissue scaffolds, catalysis supports and ion-exchange resin. However, the surfactants used in this type material were limited to nonionic surfactants or the mix of nonionic surfactant and ionic surfactant. In this work, firstly well-defined polyHIPEs were synthesized by W/O emulsions with ionic surfactant alone (e.g., CTAB). Furthermore, the polyHIPEs with much higher pore volume (14.7 cm3 g−1), uniform pore diameter and cell size were obtained by this method. Both the median pore diameter and average cell size of the polyHIPEs rose with increase of DVB concentration and/or water fraction.