Plant and leaf structures have intricate cellular and vascular interconnectivity that leads to a potentially large and diverse source of renewable materials templates for porous materials growth.  A major challenge in utilizing living botanical structures as materials templates is that they are filled with water (typically > 80% by weight) and conventional dehydration strategies collapse or degrade these intricate, yet fragile botanical structures.  This restricts the ability to introduce inorganic precursors into such structures.  We have developed a room-temperature chemical method using acidified 2,2-dimethoxypropane to dehydrate water-rich botanical materials (e.g., ZZ and water-rich jade succulent plant leaves).  This mild dehydration process leaves much of the porous cellular leaf structure intact even with ~90% mass loss.  These chemically dehydrated templates retain their original shape with foam-like macroporosity.  We have successfully grown porous and ordered TiO2 and SiO2 leaf replicate structures via sol-gel precursor impregnation methods.  This presentation will detail the chemical properties of the dried porous templates and describe recent efforts to use these botanical templates to produce other porous transition-metal oxides (e.g., Co3O4, NiO, CuO, and MnOx structures and Ni-Co-O solid solutions) using both halide, acetate or nitrate precursor impregnation strategies.  The functionalization of porous oxide structures with platinum nanoparticles and their use in photocatalytic chemical transformations will also be described.  Other porous metal oxides with interconnected pore walls may have use in electrochemical energy storage systems.  Initial electrochemical characterization of select porous metal oxides will also be presented.

Recent advances in the development of botanical templating strategies for the growth of porous monolithic metal oxide leaf replicates for photochemical catalysis or electrochemical energy uses

248th National Meeting (2014)

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