Faceted crystals with exposed highly reactive planes have attracted intensive investigations for applications such as hydrogen production, enhanced catalytic activity, and electrochemical energy storage and conversion. Herein, we report the synthesis of mesoporous NiO crystals with dominantly exposed {110} reactive facets by the thermal conversion of hexagonal Ni(OH)(2) nanoplatelets. When appl...

Pore size of mesoporous materials is crucial for their surface grafting. This article develops a novel multifunctional microsphere with a large pore size mesoporous silica shell (ca. 10.3 nm) and a magnetic core (Fe₃O₄), which is fabricated using cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) as pore-forming agents, tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) as silicon source through a sol-gel process. Compared wi...

Superconductors with periodically ordered mesoporous structures are expected to have properties very different from those of their bulk counterparts. Systematic studies of such phenomena to date are sparse, however, because of a lack of versatile synthetic approaches to such materials. We demonstrate the formation of three-dimensionally continuous gyroidal mesoporous niobium nitride (NbN) super...

There are increasing requirements worldwide for advanced separation materials with applications in environmental protection processes. Various mesoporous polymeric materials have been developed and they are considered as potential candidates. It is still challenging, however, to develop economically viable and durable separation materials from low-cost, mass-produced materials. Here we report t...

Pyrylium-containing mesoporous materials have been used for the chromo-fluorogenic sensing of biogenic amines in an aqueous environment.

We report the synthesis and characterization of a novel mesoporous material with a face-centered cubic (fcc) symmetry and intrinsic bimodal pores. Moreover, an icosahedral (ICO) mesostructure with both meso- and macroscale 5-fold symmetry is observed. We propose a hard-sphere packing (HSP) mechanism for the formation of mesoporous materials by assuming preformed robust surfactant/silicate compo...

The oxygen reduction reaction (ORR)-one of the two half-reactions in fuel cells-is one of the bottlenecks that has prevented fuel cells from finding a wide range of applications today. This is because ORR is inherently a sluggish reaction; it is also because inexpensive and sustainable ORR electrocatalysts that are not only efficient but also are based on earth-abundant elements are hard to com...

A series of mesoporous silicas impregnated with nanocrystalline sulphated zirconia was prepared by a sol-gel process using an ionic liquid-templated route. The physicochemical properties of the mesoporous sulphated zirconia materials were studied using characterisation techniques such as inductively coupled optical emission spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, ener...

The aim of the study was to investigate the effects of the loading factors, i.e., the initial drug loading concentration and the ratio of the drug to carriers, on the in vitro pharmaceutical performance of drug-loaded mesoporous systems. Ibuprofen (IBU) was used as a model drug, and two non-ordered mesoporous materials of commercial silica Syloid® 244FP (S244FP) and Neusilin® US2 (NS2) were sel...

Large-pore three-dimensional (3D) mesoporous silicas are among the most interesting mesoporous materials discovered in recent years, and they have attracted much attention for potential applications requiring easily accessible, uniform, large pores. Examples of these are SBA-15 (p6mm) and SBA16 (Im3̄m), which have cylindricaland cage-type structures, respectively. It has been reported that hexag...