Novel Function by Development of Polymeric Materials based on Silsesquioxane Element-Blocks

Abstract

Polysilsesquioxanes have been considerably utilized various materials for industrial applications, because of their excellent thermal, mechanical, optical and electrical properties, as well as, their processability using a wide variety of silane compounds as raw materials. Although molecular structures of the polysilsesquioxanes are supposed to significantly affect their properties, completely control the structures of the products at the molecular level is difficult in the case of general sol-gel method. Therefore, the correlation between structures and properties is also still unclear due to the difficulty of their structural analysis. Use of cage silsesquioxane frameworks as element-blocks has been demonstrated to be an efficient method for designing well-defined silsesquioxane materials at molecular level structures. This review focuses the potential of cage silsesquioxane based element-block materials as functional materials, especially for ionic conductive, latent heat storage, thermal conductive, and UV-resistant materials.