Press releases
Please quote Nature Materials as the source of these items.
November 2003
Novel porous structures
Porous inorganic materials are technologically important because of the enormous surface area that they present to reactants — but such materials can be difficult to create. In the December issue of Nature Materials, Shunai Che and colleagues report on a simple synthetic strategy that allow them to produce mesoporous silica with unprecedented structures.
These materials are usually prepared by using surfactant micelles — mostly spherical aggregates of molecules — as templates for the assembly and subsequent condensation of precursors for the formation of inorganic materials. The authors make use of such templating principles, but now take advantage of the interactions between anionic surfactants and inorganic precursors. These anionic surfactants are particularly attractive because they are available in a great variety of structures and are mild to humans and the environment, as they are biodegradable and obtained from sustainable resources. These interactions result in unique and well-ordered silica mesostructures that exhibit periodic and uniform pore diameters as well as two-dimensional hexagonal and lamellar phases.
The authors suggest that these unique structural features could be caused by local chirality effects due to the coexistence of micelles with different size and curvature. These surprising phenomena should open up new uses for mesoporous silica in a wide range of applications such as catalysis, adsorption, separation and nanoscale casting.
A novel anionic surfactant templating route for synthesizing mesoporous silica with unique structure pp801-805
Shunai Che, Alfonso E. Garcia-bennett, Toshiyuki Yokoi, Kazutami Sakamoto, Hironobu Kunieda, Osamu Terasaki and Takashi Tatsumi
Published online: 23 November 2003 | doi 10.1038/nmat1022
