Journal of Material Sciences & Engineering

Facile Fabrication of Porous Open-Cell Polymer Structures from Sacrificial "Natural Templates" and Composite Resins

Abstract

Siddiqui S, Arthur Coupy, Jean-Marc Tallon and Michel Dumon

In this paper, we investigate several types of “natural or bio sourced templates” (sugar, salt, bone, coral, PLA 3D-printed scaffolds) for a simple elaboration of macro porous thermoplastic or thermosetting polymers, especially based on resins commonly used in composites manufacturing. Open-cell, macro porous polymer foams are obtained from resin impregnation of a template. Process consists of 3 simple steps: a) impregnation/infiltration/infusion of the template, b) polymerization of the resin, c) removal of template, mainly by water.
We compared several resins and showed that a low viscosity and a sufficient wettability enable fast impregnation of templates, where impregnation times are <4 min for samples on 10 to 30 mm thicknesses. The resulting polymeric porous structure is the overall replication of the template, exhibiting mainly open pores in the range of 100 to 500 μm, and densities from 0.25 to 0.4 g/cm3. Such open foams behave as sponges and can (re) absorb liquids either polar (water) or alcohols or silicon oil, which are filling the entire void volume. The resin filling step is valuable to introduce additives or functions in the foams (here an impact modifier is tested).