Porous materials, with their large surface area and often exalted reactivity, are currently attracting a great deal of interest due to their wide-ranging applications in fields as diverse as sensors and biosensors, catalysis and biocatalysis, separation and purification techniques (membranes, chromatography), the development of ultralight structural materials, acoustic and electrical insulators, the controlled release of active substances, the transport of gases or charged species, and more generally, chemistry in confined environments or the design of original nanomaterials. Soft chemistry is particularly well-suited to the construction of textured structures, as it uses a wide variety of precursors and solvents under conditions that ensure good organo-mineral compatibility. The synthesis of porous inorganic or hybrid materials with complex and/or hierarchical architecture can be achieved over a very wide size range by controlling polymerization and precipitation reactions. These porous materials, elaborated in the form of films, membranes, monoliths, submicron particles or powders, offer many different physico-chemical properties that are obtained by combining their porous texture (accessibility, pore volume, specific surface area, surface-to-volume ratio) with the intrinsic characteristics of the matrix (mechanical, adsorption, redox properties, etc.).
This first lecture on nanostructured porous materials with a wide range of chemical compositions (metal oxides, metals, organo-mineral hybrids, carbonaceous replicas, etc.) summarizes this vast field of materials science. Further, more in-depth developments will be covered in future lectures. After some definitions and classifications of porous materials (figure below), we presented and commented on the different families of porous materials according to pore size and nature of the framework (macroporous materials, mesoporous materials, crystalline microporous materials, mineral zeolites and microporous materials, microporous materials with hybrid frameworks), ending with materials featuring polymodal pore systems and porous materials with hierarchical structures.
