Abstract
The controllable nanoporous material or device with highly functionality is very important issue for filtration application such as bio-sensor, rapid DNA sequence technology even the proton exchange membrane in fuel cell system. The controllable nanoporous can be realized by fabricating mesoporous material and controlling the pore size into a specific cut off range or by combine sub-micrometer solid state pore with dielectrophoresis force inside this nanoconfinement region and make this into a tunable virtual nanopore device. We have developed two controllable methods to realized the nanoporous structure. One is using solvent casting controlling technology when the epoxy based photoresist are crosslinked to generate a controllable mesoporous material. The cut off range for this mesoporous material is around 4 to 8nm depends on the solvent contain ratio. And in order to enhance the mechanical strength we composite this epoxy material with well aligned multi wall carbon nanotube to enhance the mechanical strength by 113%. Also develop a novel method for this epoxy based material surface modification and change this surface into hydrophilic property and enhance the mass transportation rate within mesoporous by UV/Ozone grafting technology. This UV/Ozone technology can not only apply to this mesoporous epoxy material but also to the embedded micro-channel made by this epoxy material. Another method is to create a solid state nanopore and controlling the dielectrophoresis inside this nanopore. By using this virtual nanopore device the pore size can be controlled from 40 nm down to 3nm by AC electric field used. Also this virtual nanopore can slow the DNA translocation speed through the nanopore device down to 0.615μm/s. In summary, we have developed a high mechanical and optical patternable mesoporous epoxy material with controllable nanopore size for bio-filtration and proton exchange membrane in fuel cell application. Also the electric field depended dielectrophoresis can act as a tunable virtual nanopore which is much easier to integrated with micro-fluidic chip system. Result shows that this two nanoporous material and device can be controlled the pore size easily and have many applications such as bio-filtration, proton exchange membrane, and controlling DNA translocation speed inside the nanochannel.