Preparation of Mesoporous Silica Monoliths with Ordered Arrays of Macrochannels Templated from Electric-Field-Oriented Hydrogels

摘要

The fabrication of ordered inorganic arrays of varying length scales and with multimodal porosities is of practical importance owing to their potential application in many areas of materials chemistry, including catalysis and separations science. A common approach to the controlled synthesis of this class of materials, first exploited in the synthesis of the MCM-41 family of molecular sieves, is to polymerize the inorganic phase around an organic template by using a sol-gel process.'31 The organic phase is then removed by calcination leaving a void space that is a replica of the size, orientation, and arrangement in space of the template. By using multiple templates of different length scales, hierarchically porous inorganic structures containing various combinations of micro-, meso-, and macropores have been realized. We report herein the creation of a mesoporous silica monolith that contains oriented macroporous channels, which is achieved by the application of an electric field to a hydrogel template during polymerization and cross-linking. To the best of our knowledge, this is first time an external electric field has been used to create ordered, hierarchical meso-/ macroporous silicate materials.