Progress on the fabrication of ordered mesoporous materials with large pores by using novel amphiphilic block copolymers as templates

Abstract

Ever since mesoporous silica M41S were reported in 1992, various mesoporous materials with diverse frameworks, abundant ordered mesostructures and different pore size have been synthesized by using commercial surfactants as template, due to their great potential for applications in energy storage and conversion, environmental remedy, catalysis. However, these mesoporous materials usually have pore sizes of less than 8.0 nm resulting from the low molecule weight of commercial templates, which greatly limit their applications in large guest objects. Moreover, these commercial templates are hard to synthesize ordered mesoporous metal oxides with high crystallinity. Recently, various amphiphilic copolymers with high molecule weight were reported to fabricate novel mesoporous materials, the recent research advances about their templated ordered mesoporous materials with large pore size and highly crystallized framework was reviewd in this paper.