Novel Pathways to Process and Harness Porous Materials

Dear Colleagues,

Naturally occurring porous materials have found useful applications since the beginning of civilization. We are now able to design and fabricate such structures synthetically, usually through bottom-up engineering, and take advantage of their unique properties to meet our ceaselessly increasing demand for technological innovation. Materials such as polymers, carbons, oxides, aerogels, or metals are already available in a wide range of structural porosities, from micro- to macroporous, and in various geometries. Their skeletal matrix makes them lightweight, while their internal surface area can reach up to square kilometres per gram. This opens the door to fascinating applications which can exploit large interfaces, including adsorption (decontamination), catalysis, electrodes for energy storage systems, drug delivery, etc.

However, there are many unexplored aspects of this technology which require the attention of the scientific community. Traditional synthetic methods such as dealloying, anodization, gas eutectic transformation, as well as soft- and hard-templating have been mastered over the years. Nevertheless, it is necessary to investigate and develop new approaches to expand the synthesis of porous materials to compounds that have historically been more difficult to assemble (e.g., semiconductors, multicomponents) and to improve our control of the structure of traditional porous compounds (e.g., pore size distribution, ordering, orientation, periodicity). Another area requiring improvement is our lack of control over the crystallinity of mesoporous materials synthesized through soft-templating approach, since the integrity of the architecture is usually jeopardized by typical annealing methods. Finally, it is important to rejuvenate the interest in applications which do not target directly the surface area of the porous materials, used as-prepared or in a composite form. Examples are optics (non-linear optics, photonic crystals, meta-materials), thermoelectrics, pore size-dependent sensing, microfluidics, etc.

This Special Issue is focused on innovative routes to the synthesis micro-, meso-, and macroporous materials, as well as pioneering and/or exotic approaches to harnessing their properties, directly (as-prepared) or indirectly (composites). Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Novel strategies to fabricate zeolites, zeotypes, micro-, meso-, and macroporous materials, or ways to improve traditional synthetic approaches;
• Innovative porous materials-based composites (inorganic, organic, hybrids), addressing pore-filling;
• Exotic porous materials (semiconductors, binary, ternary, quaternary);
• Exotic architectures for traditional compounds (high degree of ordering, orientation, periodicity);
• Addressing crystallinity in porous materials;
• New insights into the properties of porous materials;
• Use of porous materials in optical applications (non-linear optics, photonic crystals, meta-materials, surface-enhanced Raman scattering);
• Use of porous materials in thermoelectric applications;
• Use of porous materials in sensing applications;
• Use of porous materials in microfluidic applications;

Dr. Victor Malgras
Guest Editor

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• porous
• mesoporous
• macroporous
• microporous