Coupling Nanobuilding Block and Breath Figures Approaches for the Designed Construction of Hierarchically Templated Porous Materials and Membranes

The chemical strategies offered by the coupling of functional nanobuilding blocks (NBBs, made of surface hybrided nanoparticles of SiO 2, TiO 2, Co, and CdS) and breath figures processing allows for the development of new porous materials with hierarchical porosity. Honeycomb-like macroporous membranes or films made of metallic oxides, metals, or chalcogenides having mesoporous walls can be easily obtained. The presented strategy is general, simple, and versatile and allows for the assembling of a large variety of structurally well-defined nanoparticles with very different chemical compositions into complex porous architectures. Moreover, the adjustable size of the nanobuilding block unit permits an easy tuning of the average size of the mesoporosity between 2 and 50 nm.