Study of the Porosity of the Microgel of pAA and Co‐Polymer Microgel of p(AA‐co‐NIPAM) Through the Thermoporometry Technique

Summary The porosity of hydrogels is a parameter of great importance for biomedical applications. Techniques to evaluate the porosity are relatively time consuming and somewhat expensive. In the present work, we evaluated a technique known as thermoporometry (TPM). The technique does not require complicated preparation of samples and allows the evaluation of the size and distribution of the pores by the measurement of the thermal behavior of the samples by DSC equipment. This work presents in a comparative way the evaluation of two samples of microgels, a poly(acrylic acid) microgel (pAA) and a co‐polymer microgel of poly(acrylic acid‐co‐N‐isopropylacrylamide) p(AA‐co‐NiPAM). The goal is to show the method sensitivity to study different samples of gels. The results showed that the porous structures of these microgels, expressed by their pore size distribution are different, which is an indicative that the method had the sensitivity to identify this difference.