Bicontinuous Intraphase Jammed Emulsion Gels: A New Soft Material Enabling Direct Isolation of Co-Continuous Hierarchial Porous Materials

Abstract

Materials with hierarchical, bicontinuous porosity are desirable for numerous applications, providing a continuous pathway for reactants and products and a large interfacial surface area for reaction/storage. Herein, we demonstrate a low-energy and flexible route to dual scale co-continuous materials via a new class of soft material first reported here—bicontinuous intraphase-jammed emulsion gels, referred here as bipjels. Alumina-coated silica nanoparticles (AlO-SiO NPs) are shown to stabilize bicontinuous emulsion gels formed by the spinodal decomposition of water/2,6-lutidine (W/L) via a percolating network of attractive NPs within the water-rich phase. The prepared bipjels are tunable depending on pre-mixing conditions and NP concentration. Following bipjel formation, a free-standing co-continuous monolith of AlO-SiO NPs with macro- and mesoporosity is directly extractable owing to the high mechanical strength of the percolating network of stabilizing NPs. Overall, this new class of soft materials is shown to overcome the inherent difficulty in creating thermodynamically unstable bicontinuous morphologies via a scalable, template-, and organic binder-free method, producing materials that are near-ideal for catalytic, storage, or separation applications.