In this article, we demonstrate a newly developed technique for generation of nanoporous polymer materials. Generally, the production processes of polymeric nanostructured materials require high pressure due to the handling of gaseous blowing agents. Our new approach allows to generate nanoporous polymer materials without blowing agent at ambient conditions. Starting from a crosslinked polymer gel swollen with a mixture of at least two specially selected solvents leads to a nanoporous material by sequential evaporation. We varied the pore size of the generated structures between 80 and 800 nm so that the effect of the pore size on the gaseous thermal conductivity could be analyzed. Decreasing the pore size of the materials, the gaseous thermal conductivity could be reduced considerably. Thus, we developed a blowing agent free technique which allows the generation of nanoporous polymer materials—Knudsen materials—at an ambient pressure.

The formation kinetics of oil-rich, nonionic microemulsions were investigated along different mixing pathways using a fast stopped-flow device in combination with the new high-flux small-angle neutron spectrometer D33 (ILL, Grenoble, France). While the kinetics along most pathways were too fast to be resolved, two processes could be detected mixing brine and the binary cyclohexane/C10E5 solution. Here, too, the formation of large water-in-oil droplets was found to be faster than 20 ms and therewith faster than the accessible dead time. However, subsequently, both the disintegration of the large water-in-oil droplets (600 Å) and the uptake of water by swollen micelles (50–60 Å) could be resolved. Both processes occur on the time scale of a second. Strikingly, the total internal interface forms faster than 20 ms and does not change over time.

Recently, it turned out that nanostructured reaction media containing highly inert solvents as tetrahydrothiophen-1,1-dioxide (sulfolane) are beneficial for strongly oxidizing or reductive reactions. Because of their ability of solubilizing polar and nonpolar solvents with a large nanostructured interface in particular microemulsions provide such interesting reaction media. Starting from the pseudoternary microemulsion H2O–n-octane–C12E4/C12E5 (polyoxyethylene n-alkyl ether), water was successively replaced by the highly inert tetrahydrothiophen-1,1-dioxide (sulfolane). We found that an increasing sulfolane content drives the system beyond the tricritical point. Replacing the already long chain surfactants C12E4 and C12E5 by a mixture of the even longer chain surfactants C18E6 and C18E8, we were able to prepare nonaqueous sulfolane microemulsions for the first time. We also teach how in a second step the phase behavior of the hydrophilic sulfolane–n-octane–C18E8 system can be tuned at constant temperature (as required by the reaction conditions) by addition of the hydrophobic cosurfactant 1-octanol (C8E0). The change in curvature that occurs by adding 1-octanol is demonstrated measuring the size of reverse micelles by DLS. We found that the radius varies from at least 8 to 16 nm, a suitable sizes for inverse nanoreaction vessels.