Active sol-gel materials

Abstract

The sol-gel method is one of the fasted developing technologies yielding a wide variety of glasses, ceramics and crystalline materials [1]. This simple and cheap technique allows obtaining basically any form of the products i.e. bulks, films, fibers or powders. Due to its wet-chemistry nature and low synthetic temperatures various inorganic-inorganic and inorganic-organic hybrids can be produced. The methods available include doping with various molecules and/or synthesizing covalently bound or entangled multi-polymeric networks. The doping can be realized by e.g. occlusion, surface adsorption or chemical grafting of the guest molecules. Thanks to the mild synthetic conditions of the method the doping can be performed with simple inorganic chemicals, organic compounds and biomolecules as well as living organisms. The method is successfully used to generate materials for such applications like e.g. sensors, bioactive materials, protective coatings, optical materials, catalysts, materials for microelectronics etc. A brief overview of the sol-gel materials produced by the researchers affiliated with the "Sol-Gel Materials & Nanotechnology" Center of Excellence will be presented. These materials include, among others, submicron silica spheres with nanosized metallic inclusions [2], interpenetrated network (IPN) organic-inorganic hybrids [3], various sensing films based on optical and electrical phenomena [4] etc. Also, computer modeling of the produced materials based on the so-called ballistic aggregation approach will be presented [5].