Liquid Foams as Template for Macroporus Hydrogels Synthesis

Foam templates are produced by a simple rapid gas dispersion into an aqueous monomer solution at various dispersion concentrations. The templates are corsslinked at room temperature to obtain interconnected polydispersed solid foams. The foams are analyzed for their stability by measuring coarsening rates and drainage times to quantify and compare the effect of the volume of gas dispersion. The pseudoplastic flow behavior of foamswas fitted using Herschel-Bulkley model to calculate the required foaming energy. The benefits of using a foam templating method in comparison to emulsion templating method are the increased starting material efficiency and elimination of the removal step of the dispersed phase as in emulsion templating. Another challenge in emulsion-templating is to make porous polymers with pore size in the range of 50-200 µm for applications such as tissue engineering, which can be resolved in foam-templating method. We investigate the morphological characteristics and mechanical properties of obtained porous polymers from foam- and emulsion-templating methods.