Monodisperse emulsions as template for highly structured polymer foams

The aim of this work was to synthesize and characterize highly structured monodisperse polymer foams. The task was tackled by combining the traditional concept of emulsion templating with droplet-based microfluidics in order to first generate monodisperse water-in-monomer emulsions and to subsequently synthesize highly structured polymer foams by polymerizing the monomers. This novel technique allowed us for the first time to study systematically the structure-property relationship of the resulting polymer foams. The results are expected to give new insights about the tuning possibilities of emulsion templating and may open a new arena for tailor-made polymer foams.