Designing Porous Solids over Multiple Pore Size Regimes

This chapter highlights some of the recent synthetic approaches to inorganic solids (especially silicates) with designed porosity on multiple levels, covering pore size ranges from a few Angstroms (micropores) through two to tens (mesopores) and hundreds (macropores) of nanometers. To achieve controlled porosity in these size regimes, molecular structure directors, supramolecular arrays of surfactants, block copolymers, emulsions, colloidal crystals, bacteria and porous carbon have been used as templates. Hierarchical porosity with bimodal or higher pore size distributions can be attained by employing combinations of these methods in multi-template processes.