Mesoporous materials and electrochemistry

Ordered mesoporous materials prepared by the template route have attracted increasing interest from the electrochemists community due to their plenty of unique properties and functionalities that can be effectively exploited in electrochemical devices. This review will cover the whole field of the intersection between electrochemistry and ordered mesoporous materials. The latter are either electronically insulating (silica and some other metal oxides, as well as silica-based organic-inorganic hybrid materials), semi-conducting (metal oxides), or conducting (metals, carbons). The three main intersection areas are: (1) the development/use of electrochemical methods to characterize the properties of mesoporous materials (i.e., charge and mass transfer processes); (2) the generation of mesostructured solids by electro-assisted deposition using appropriate templates; and (3) the application of these novel materials for electrochemical purposes. The most common devices to date are based on a bulk composite or thin film configuration and the resulting electrodes modified with such mesoporous materials have been successfully applied in various fields, including mainly electrochemical sensing and biosensing as well as energy conversion and storage (620 references).