Porous or hollow polymer particles of micron sizes are finding many interesting applications. In this paper, we present a novel suspension polymerization technique to synthesize acrylate polymers that have porous or hollow interior structure. The polymerization technique utilizes the thermodynamic phase separation and mass transfer to create void space in a hard polymer matrix. Our study is focused on investigating the effects of reaction conditions and the reaction media on the formation of void spaces and their physical structures. In this work, we illustrate that the spherical particle geometry may be destroyed under certain reaction conditions that result in a polymer shell which is too weak to sustaine the pressure from the liquid outside of the particle. Compared to other reported polymerization techniques, the proposed technique offers a facile means to synthesize the porous and multihollow polymer particles in a large scale. The results of polymerization kinetics study and the morphological analysis of the porous/hollow polymer particles will be presented in detail at the meeting.

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