Nanoporous materials for energy related and sensing applications

Nanoporous non-siliceous materials such as carbons, nitrides, and phosphides have attracted much attention in the recent years due to their enormous applications in the fields of adsorption, catalysis, and fuel cells. However, the incorporation of hetero atoms such as boron and nitrogen in the non-siliceous materials can significantly change their electronic and semi-conducting properties. Firstly I will present some results about the discovery of the nanoporous carbon and nitride materials, and the basics and the mechanism behind the synthesis of various nanoporous nitride materials with different pore structure and textural parameters. Then, the preparation, characterization and the applications of one and three dimensional nanoporous carbon nitrides materials synthesized using various inorganic templates with the different pore structures (MCN-11,2 and MCN-23) through a simple polymerization reaction between ethylenediamine (EDA) and carbon tetrachloride (CTC) will be presented. Moreover, the methods to control the textural parameters and the nitrogen content of the nanoporous carbon nitride materials, which have been solely developed in my group, will also be discussed.4 Not only the powder materials but also the different ways for the fabrication of nanoporous carbon nitride nanoparticles and films with hierarchical ordered structure and morphology will be demonstrated. In addition, I will show some of the results on the preparation of nanoporous boron nitride (MBN) and boron carbon nitride (MBCN) which have been prepared by novel elemental substitution technique5 using nanoporous carbon as the template at very high temperature. In the last part of the talk, I briefly discuss about the different ways of preparing nanoporous carbon materials with various structure types, especially “Carbon Nanocage and Carbon Nanocoops”, and to tune the pore diameters and textural parameters. The applications of the materials including sensing of different molecules and biosensing will be discussed in detail.6−12