Fabrication of a porous polyimide membrane using a silicon nanowire array as a template

Abstract

We demonstrate that a porous polyimide membrane can be fabricated by curing liquid polyimide on a vertically oriented silicon nanowire array and selectively etching away the nanowire-array-template using xenon difluoride (XeF(2)). Pore size and density using the described technique are controllable. The former is dependent on nanowire diameter and the duration of etching, whereas pore density is determined by silicon nanowire density. We believe that the described porous membrane fabrication method can be applied to various polymer and nanowire systems. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.