Preparation of porous CaCO3/PAM composites by CO2 in water emulsion templating method

Emulsion templating is an effective method to prepare well-defined porous polymeric materials. In this paper, porous CaCO3/polyacrylamide (PAM) composites were prepared by emulsion templating polymerization in supercritical CO2(scCO2) by using a commercial grade surfactant (FC4430), therefore, the amount of the fillers and the pore size distribution of the composites can be modulated based on the demands of those potential applications as biomaterials. Calcium carbonate crystals can be in situ synthesized in the porous PAM matrix, and the morphology of CaCO3 varied with the conditions of the reaction, the results indicated that three kinds of crystals were observed in the porous matrix. The results of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP) showed that the macropores in PAM were interconnected and with narrow pore size distributions.