Porous polymers, integrating the advantages of porous materials and conventional polymers, have been well developed and exhibited tremendous attention in the fields of material, chemistry and biology. Of these, boron-containing conjugated porous polymers, featuring tunable geometric structures, unique Lewis acid boron centers and very rich physical properties, such as high specific surface, cha...

Nanostructured materials are promising as thermoelectrics since thermal transport can be suppressed with little degradation in electrical properties, a crucial requirement for high-efficiency thermal energy conversion. Porous materials offer a flexible platform thanks to their extensive range of possible configurations and robust nature compared to other nanostructures. Although there has been ...

Porous materials have recently been used in absorptive treatments around railway tracks to reduce noise emissions. To investigate the effect of porous materials, a finite element model has been developed. 2D models for porous materials have been considered either as an equivalent fluid or as a poroelastic material based on the Biot theory. The two models have been validated and compared with ea...

The freeze-casting of porous materials has received a great deal of attention during the past few years. This simple process, where a material suspension is simply frozen and then sublimated, provides materials with unique porous architectures, where the porosity is almost a direct replica of the frozen solvent crystals. This review focuses on the recent results on the process and the derived p...

Although extensive efforts have been put into the development of porous scaffolds for bone regeneration, with encouraging results, all porous materials have a common limitation: the inherent lack of strength associated with porosity. Hence, the development of porous hydroxyapatite scaffolds has been hindered to non-load bearing applications. We report here how freeze casting can be applied to s...

The need to decrease signal delay and cross-talk in interconnects within integrated circuits is becoming increasingly important as device dimensions shrink. Electrical connections require lower resistivity metals and lower dielectric constant insulating films to meet future goals. Even these materials may not provide for sufficient signal bandwidth, and so optical interconnections are also envi...

Porous materials are found in natural structures such as wood, bone, coral, cork and sponge and are synonymous with strong and lightweight structures. It is not surprising that manmade porous materials have followed and those made from polymers and ceramics have been widely exploited. The commercialisation of porous metals has lagged somewhat behind, but has received a boost following a surge i...

Soft porous silicone rubbers are demonstrated to exhibit extremely low sound speeds of tens of m/s for these dense materials, even for low porosities of the order of a few percent. Our ultrasonic experiments show a sudden drop of the longitudinal sound speed with the porosity, while the transverse sound speed remains constant. For such porous elastomeric materials, we propose simple analytical ...