The processes involved in the transformation of non-porous, native polysaccharides to their highly porous equivalents introduce significant molecular complexity and are not yet fully understood. In this paper, we propose that distinct changes in polysaccharide local short-range ordering promotes and directs the formation of meso- and micro-pores, which are investigated here using N2 sorption, F...

The design and development of many separation and catalytic process technologies require a proper quantitative description of diffusion of mixtures of guest molecules within porous crystalline materials. This tutorial review presents a unified, phenomenological description of diffusion inside meso- and micro-porous structures. In meso-porous materials, with pore sizes 2 nm < d(p) < 50 nm, there...

Super-hydrophobic surfaces are bio-inspired interfaces with a superficial texture that, in its most common evolution, is formed by a periodic lattice of silicon micro-pillars. Similar surfaces reveal superior properties compared to conventional flat surfaces, including very low friction coefficients. In this work, we modified meso-porous silicon micro-pillars to incorporate networks of metal na...

Meso-porous metal materials have enhanced surface energies offering unique surface properties with potential applications in chemical catalysis, molecular sensing and selective separation. In this paper, commercial 20 nm diameter metal nano-particles, including silver and copper were blended with 7 nm silica nano-particles by shear mixing. The resulted powders were cold-sintered to form dense, ...

There is increasing demand to functionalize meso- and nanoporous materials by coating and make the porous substrate biocompatible or environmentally friendly. However, coating on a meso-porous substrate poses great challenges, especially if the pore aspect ratio is high. We adopted the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method to coat Ni(3)Al-based meso-porous membranes, which were fabricated from a...

Novel hierarchically ordered porous magnetic nanocomposites with interconnecting macroporous windows and meso-microporous walls containing well dispersed magnetic nanoparticles have been fabricated and used as a support to immobilise lipase for the efficient hydrolysis of ester.

A novel hierarchically ordered porous vanado-silicate nanocomposite with interconnecting macroporous windows and meso-microporous walls containing well dispersed vanadyl species has been fabricated and used as a heterogeneous catalyst for the oxidation of a bulky organic molecule, namely cyclooctene.

Nanofiltration with inorganic meso-porous membranes is being considered more and more for water purification applications. For specific applications inorganic membranes may have advantages over organic polymer-based membranes due to their rigid pore structure, and thermochemical stability. However, the permeability and, partly through that, the permselectivity of inorganic membranes need to be ...

Mass transport of molecular compounds through porous solids is a decisive step in numerous, important applications like chromatography or heterogeneous catalysis. It is a multi-scale, hierarchical phenomenon: macrodiffusion (>μm) is influenced, in addition to parameters like grain boundaries and particle packing, by meso-scale (>10 nm, <μm) factors like particle size and the connectivity of por...