Tailoring Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles and Thin Films: Synthesis, Characterization and Electrochemical Applications

Abstract

Mesoporous silica materials have played great roles in widespread application areas like adsorption, catalysis, and separation due to their high surface area, large pore volume and tunable pore size and structure. One of the approaches for extending the application of mesoporous silica materials is tailoring their wall with various functional groups. However, the conventional post-grafting method results in lightly dense, heterogeneously distributed and less accessible functional groups. In our work, a new method that leads to dense and uniform functionalization of the wall without clogging of the pores has been employed. The hybrid silica-based materials are fabricated either through diblock copolymer templated sol-gel method or through electro-assisted self-assembly method. In the former case, since the template is self-assembled functional amphiphilic diblock copolymer, the selective removing of the hydrophobic block results in porous and PEO functionalized silica materials. Textural and structural properties of the hybrid porous materials will be presented. Furthermore, their application in the area of Li-ion battery as solid composite polymer electrolytes will be discussed. In the later case, surfactant templated mesoporous silica films have been fabricated on conductive substrates via electro-assisted self-assembly method. Hexagonally well-ordered and vertically oriented mesochannels with a diameter of 3nm are obtained in a large domain across the resulted films. The permeability, morphology and nanostructure of the films will be presented. Figure 1