Polymer-oriented evaporation induced self-assembly strategy to synthesize highly crystalline mesoporous metal oxides

Abstract

Mesoporous metal oxides (MMOs) with high crystallinity and large surface area, as compared with its counterparts, show better performance in many applications. Current synthesis of MMOs mainly uses amphiphilic block copolymers as templates to co-assemble with metal oxide precursors. Due to the block copolymers are usually decomposed below 300 °C in air, the obtained MMOs are amorphous or semicrystalline with low thermal stability. Here, we develop a general and facile polymer-oriented evaporation induced self-assembly strategy to prepare thermostable MMOs with high crystallinity and large surface area by using metal chlorides as metal oxide precursors and cationic polymers as porogens. Our method is shown to access a library of crystalline MMOs with a range of compositions and structures including single-component MMOs, doped MMOs, multi-component MMOs, and polymetallic oxide. This approach may open up new horizons in preparing other highly crystalline mesoporous materials, such as metal phosphates, metal sulfides, metal carbide, and so on.