Porous materials are crucial in modern society – from sponges, to materials to absorb toxic metal waste, to controlled release of drugs, or to use as scaffolds for cell growth. A template is needed to make the pores, which is often disposed of after, such as a solvent or a (nano) particle. Cryogels, are porous polymer materials made using ice as the template, which only has water as the waste product – so they are potentially very sustainable. However, ice crystals are dynamic and grow, once frozen so the materials are not always reproducible, nor predictable. In our latest work, published in the RSC’s Flagship Materials Journal, Materials Horizons, we show how we can ‘program’ ice crystal size using ice binding polymers, and hence control the properties of cryogels. This means we remove the trial and error, and we can change the properties of the materials simply by tuning the ice!
We call this ICE-CAP: Ice Crystal Engineering for Cryogel Architecture Programming
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