## 3 Conclusions  
As presented in this study, a library of novel, fully transparent PSt-\(l\)-PDMS and PSt-\(l\)-PDMS/DVB double-hydrophobic conetworks with a broad range of PDMS content (30-80 wt%) have been successfully synthesized by radical copolymerization of styrene with methacryloxymethyl-telechelic PDMS via the so-called macromonomer method in both the absence and presence of DVB as an additional low molecular weight crosslinker. The addition of DVB to the styrene-PDMS reaction mixtures led to higher gel fractions (84-92%) than that for the PSt-\(l\)-PDMS networks (53-63%) due to the increased crosslinking densities caused by the DVB. The lower gel fractions in the case of the PSt-\(l\)-PDMS networks, that is, without the addition of DVB, are presumably due to the formation of a relatively large amount of insufficiently short polystyrene chains for reaching gelation. This is well reflected by the higher PDMS contents in the PSt-\(l\)-PDMS contexts than that in the feed, on the one hand. On the other hand, the presence of DVB resulted in coneworks with almost the same composition as that of the styrene and PDMS in the feeds. Relatively high DVB content, i.e., 1:5 (\(m/m\)) DVB/St ratio, led to hypercrosslinked coneworks without preventing the incorporation of the PDMS macro crosslinker into such conework structures. For the determination of the composition of the coneworks, a new method was developed, which is based on measuring the composition of the extracted (non-gelled) materials by \({}^{1}\)H NMR spectroscopy. It was found that the composition obtained by elemental analysis of the extracted coneworks and that determined by considering the composition of the extracted materials agree well. This means that when the expensive and laborious elemental analysis of polymer networks, gels, blends, and composites is not available, a well-designed extraction followed by the determination of the composition of the extracted  
Figure 7: The diffusion exponent (\(n\)) values of the PSt-\(l\)-PDMS and PSt-\(l\)-PDMS/DVB concentrworks in 1-nitropropane (1-PrNO\({}_{2}\)) (**left**) and hexane (**right**) as a function of the PDMS content. material enables us to obtain the composition of the main polymer product, i.e., the bi- or multi-component polymer system remaining after extraction. The structural characterization of the transparent, macroscopically homogeneous PSt-\(l\)-PDMS and PSt-\(l\)-PDMS/DVB networks by DSC, SAXS, and AFM has revealed that a disordered bicontinuous (cocontinuous) nanophase-separated morphology exists in these macromolecular assemblies, which are composed of immiscible components in their free states, i.e., PSt and PDMS. Phase separation is clearly proved by DSC traces with two distinct glass transition temperatures in the regions of the PSt and PDMS homopolymers. The SAXS curves of all investigated contexts have a maximum, indicating the nanophase-separated domain structure with \(d\)-spacing in the range of 8-17 nm. This decreases with increasing PDMS macrocrosslinker content, i.e., with increasing crosslinking density. The AFM phase images of cryo-sectioned surfaces corroborate the SAXS and DSC results by showing a disordered bicontinuous (cocontinuous) nanophasic morphology for all PSt-\(l\)-PDMS and PSt-\(l\)-PDMS/DVB networks, including even the hypercrosslinked coneworks with 1:5 \((m/m)\) DVB/St ratio. The good resolution of the AFM images afforded to estimate the average domain distances, which fall in the range of 9-16 nm, i.e., in good agreement with the \(d\)-spacing values obtained by the SAXS measurements. These results of our systematic investigations clearly prove that the macroscopic phase separation is prevented by the covalent crosslinking between the immiscible PSt and PDMS chains, resulting in the formation of disordered bicontinuous nanophases in the PSt-\(l\)-PDMS and PSt-\(l\)-PDMS/DVB networks over the entire investigated compositional range with 30-80 wt% PDMS content.