PNNL

Abstract

Over the last decade, a great deal of effort has been expended on the templated synthesis of nanoporous materials. Many different templates have been used to create this nanostructure (surfactants, polymers, latex spheres, etc.), but by far the most widely used has been micelles composed of surfactants. This is a versatile, and highly useful, synthetic method, capable of producing a wide variety of materials and structures. More recently, the synthesis of hierarchical pore structures (i.e. small pores leading to large pores) has been of great interest as a means of enhancing mass transport within these materials.[1] Such hierarchical pore structures have been made by combining surfactant templating methods with latex beads [2], by assembling as-synthesized MCM-41 particles around block co-polymer micelles, followed by crosslinking and calcination.[3], by spray drying MCM-41 and MCM-48 agglomerates [4], and by using “evaporation induced self-assembly” [5-9].