Glycerol-Based Bicontinuous Cubic Lyotropic Liquid Crystal Monomer System for the Fabrication of Thin-Film Membranes with Uniform Nanopores

Functional Liquid Crystals towards the Next Generation of Materials

“…Porous materials with well-ordered sub-nanopores with uniform diameter have attracted attention as filtration membranes. [135][136][137][138] LC polymers, [136,[142][143][144][145][146] carbon-based materials, such as graphene oxide [147] and carbon nanotubes, [148] and channel peptides [149] are potential representative materials of such porous materials.N anostructured films based on polymerized thermotropic or lyotropic liquid crystals have been shown to provide sub-nanopores with uniform diameter. There have been some reports on the use of these nanostructured polymers for separation membranes.…”

“…Gin and co-workers applied lyotropic liquid crystals as separation membranes.T hey demonstrated that water-treatment membranes based on lyotropic LC states showed rejection selectivity depending on the size of the nanochannels and the solutes. [142][143][144] These membranes were obtained by in situ polymerization of bicontinuous cubic structures of ionic gemini surfactants [142,143] as well as hexagonal columnar structures of ab enzoate derivative. [144] For example,acrosslinkable gemini imidazolium system with pores of 0.75 nm in diameter demonstrated ah igh salt rejection ability which was comparable with that of RO membranes.…”

Zwitterionic copolymer self-assembly for fouling resistant, high flux membranes with size-based small molecule selectivity

“…Other researchers have prepared membranes with ~1 nm pores by narrowing the pores of track-etched membranes by electroless gold deposition [12], molecular "squares" coated onto a porous substrate to form thin film composite (TFC) membranes [13], and lyotropic liquid crystal (LLC) assemblies [14][15][16]. Although these membranes have pore sizes in the right range, they suffer from one or more limitations.…”

“…LLC-based membranes have charged surfaces, and hence have selectivity that is strongly affected by solute charge [14][15][16]. Others are difficult and expensive to manufacture at large scale [17][18][19].…”

Functional liquid-crystalline polymers and supramolecular liquid crystals

“…In the case of compound 38c, Q I phases were prepared in the presence of glycerol instead of water, and the resulting membranes showed significant rejection properties of salts, but also of different small organic molecules such as sucrose and glucose. 210 These membranes seem to be operated by size exclusion. They exhibit well-defined structures of channels with homogenous size of pores, which allows the controlled selectivity.…”