Persistent Micelle Templates (PMT) provide remarkable power to independently control each dimension of a porous material. The simplest experiment is it maintain constant pore size from persistent micelles and then adjust the wall-thickness freely by changing the material:template ratio.
Achieving the specific dimensions you want for a particular study is difficult with a guess-and-check route so we have developed a series of simple geometric models that algebraically predict the outcome of any PMT experiment. For the adventurous, the derivations and formulas are available here in the freely available supplemental information. Once you have a little sample information (fitted parameters or educated guesses) you can start to make predictions for exactly what the result should be.
SAXS is a very versatile way to quickly screen sample series for PMT conditions. Here one should expect to observe a lattice expansion corresponding to increasing material between the templates and constant template size. Considering the conservation of volume, you should expect a cube root type dependence of the lattice dimension with the M:T ratio:
This of course corresponds to a constant template dimension with a continuously tunable material wall-thickness:
Make your own PMT predictions
Parameters
Data Points