Nanoporous Materials from Mineral and Organic Templates

Abstract

Nanoporous materials have attracted great interest because of their excellent porous properties, which are expected to lead to a variety of applications exploiting their ordered nanospace structures. In general they are prepared using chemical reagents as the inorganic sources, structurally directed by the use of organic templates. Thus, an ordered nanospace structure is formed by the polymerization of inorganic monomers assisted by organic templating molecules. By contrast, many studies have been reported using minerals as the inorganic sources to prepare unique ordered nanoporous materials which can display different properties from materials prepared using chemical reagents. In these cases, the mineral starting materials play an important role in building up ordered nanospace structures originating from their unique initial structures, i.e., these reactions are self-templating. Thus, the resulting nanoporous materials constitute a new family of ordered nanospace structures. In this chapter, the preparation and properties of nanoporous materials from mineral and organic templates are outlined and compared with nanoporous materials derived from chemical reagents by the use of organic templates.