(180bz) Scaffolded Growth of Hierarchically Structured Porous Materials towards High-Flux Molecular Separations and Reaction-Separation Technologies

The ability to rationally design and synthesize porous inorganic particles and thin membranes with hierarchically ordered micro-mesoporosity and controlled morphology stands to impact selectivity and efficiency in catalytic, adsorption, and membrane-based separations applications.  This poster will detail design strategies focused on realizing porous materials suitable for applications spanning catalysis of bulky molecules to high-flux molecular separations.  Specifically, we will describe a facile nanotemplating approach in which pre-formed inorganic nanoparticles are assembled into ordered colloidal crystal structures and employed as hard, sacrificial templates for both direct and indirect porous replica formation.  The work is predicated upon the hypothesis that hard inorganic templates help resist pore collapse during structural coarsening or confined growth of inorganic replica materials, and that decoupling template formation and replication allows for precise and versatile engineering of the template, and thus the replica pore topology.  We will describe various stages of materials assembly emanating from controlled synthesis of primary inorganic nanoparticle building units with nanometer resolution, and encompassing their multi-modal (i.e., size, function) assembly into hierarchically ordered porous structures, templating of higher-order porous materials, and realization of multiscale (e.g., micro-/mesoporous) porous substrates.  Examples of materials derived via this hierarchical assembly and templating strategy that will be discussed include mesostructured silica substrates with tunable pore topology and ordered decoration by inorganic catalytic nanoparticles to ultra-thin zeolite films realized by scaffolded growth.