Polymer Foam Nanocomposites Synthesised Via Nanoparticle Stabilised Emulsions

Polymer foams are an important class of materials in tissue engineering as they are highly porous, interconnected and have high surface areas. This makes them excellent candidates as scaffolds for tissue engineering. Emulsion templating is a viable method to prepare polymer foams with such qualities, which would make suitable scaffolds for cell proliferation. This versatile technique is quickly gaining interest as it is a straightforward method that affords the user good control over the porosity and pore morphology of resulting polymer foams. Besides being in an injectable liquid form, a range of porosities and pore morphologies can also be achieved by varying the composition of the emulsion templates.

We report on the synthesis of electrically conducting polymer foams synthesised from graphene oxide-stabilised emulsion templates. By polymerising water-in-oil emulsions stabilised by functionalised graphene oxide, open-celled polymer foams with high porosities of above 80% and average pore diameters ranging from 100 mm to 300 mm were obtained. Functionalised graphene oxide platelets adsorb at the oil-water interface during emulsification and on polymerisation formed a 3D network spanning the entire polymer foam, making it electrically conducting. Such porous materials could be especially interesting as scaffolds for the directional differentiation of stem cells by applying an external electrical stimulus.