Colloidal Crystal Templating Approaches to Materials with Hierarchical Porosity

Advances in Colloidal Assembly: The Design of Structure and Hierarchy in Two and Three Dimensions

“…Only some instructive examples are highlighted for certain types of assembly processes. A detailed introduction to the field of inverse opals, their assembly, material choices, and applications can be found in recent review articles. ,,,, …”

Hierarchically structured composites and porous materials from soft templates: fabrication and applications

“…A colloidal crystal contains a large number of monodisperse colloidal particles arranged in a three-dimensional uniform array. 31 The most common colloidal crystal structure is the face centred cubic (FCC), however there are reports of other lattice geometries. 32,33 These colloidal crystals can be used as sacrificial hard templates to introduce well-ordered and monodisperse pores into materials (Figure 3).…”

Pursuing the Crystallization of Mono- and Polymetallic Nanosized Crystalline Inorganic Compounds by Low-Temperature Wet-Chemistry and Colloidal Routes

“…The pursuit of not only defined and tailored composition and crystalline structure but also of selected shapes and morphologies is currently a widely explored topic in the field of synthesis of inorganic nanomaterials displaying exotic morphologies. In this context, the employment of the so-called “structure-directing agents” such as templating agents and membranes, scaffolds, surfactants micelles, and ligands represents a versatile tool to direct the structural evolution of the targeted nanostructures. ,,,,,,− In fact, according to the nature and shape of the template, the resulting nanostructures display 3D, 1D, or hollow morphologies. As already outlined by Cushing et al in their comprehensive review on the topic, a sharp and unambiguous distinction and classification can be hardly performed, since the general definition of “template synthesis” encompasses a broad variety of synthetic approaches and methods which can be better described as hybrid approaches among further strategies (e.g., seeded growth in the presence of a ligand, colloidal-related methods, etc.).…”

“…When dealing with templating, a further rough distinction to be performed is the one between soft templating and hard templating, ,, with the former being typically soft materials, such as micelles, gels, biogenic scaffolds (e.g., chitin), affording the formation of globular or spherical systems which serves as templates, which then yield a 3D, typically spherical shape. Smarsly et al developed different polymer- and block copolymer-based templates to prepare mesoporous ceria , and LiFePO 4 .…”