Controlled porosity is a key property of many materials for energy applications. There are nowadays many different pathways for the creation of controlled pore systems, such as soft templating, hard templating, templateless procedures, and others. Controlled pore systems can provide access to active sites, they restrict the growth of particles and guarantee stable high dispersion, or they compartmentalize different functionalities. Hollow carbon spheres with controlled pores of around 6 nm in the shell are excellent matrices for the deposition of platinum and platinum-based alloy particles. The confinement of the alloy precursors prevent sintering during the alloying step ("confined space alloying"), resulting in fuel-cell catalysts with excellent activity and - more importantly - stability.1 Via a different synthetic protocol CoPt alloy nanoparticles can be created in porous carbon shells. These catalysts allow conversion of 5-hydroxymethylfurfural to dimethylfuran at almost 100 % yield, a key step in the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fuels.2 The micropores in carbon triazine frameworks provide nitrogen coordination sites for platinum, allowing Pt-coordination resembling the motifs of the molecular Periana-system for methane activation. This allows the synthesis of solid catalysts which are active in the oxidation of methane to methanebisulfate in oleum.3 Metallic cobalt nanoparticles are created in the pores of CMK-5 at very high loading, which results in a battery electrode material with excellent capacity and stability.4 These developments will be placed in context and an update of recent advances will be given. 1C. Baldizzone et al., Angew.Chem.Int.Ed. 53, 14250 (2014) 2G.H.Wang et al., Nature Mater. 13, 293 (2014) 3R. Palkovits et al., Angew.Chem.Int.Ed. 48, 6909 (2009) 4D.Gu et al., Angew.Chem.Int.Ed., in press

Nanomaterials with controlled porosity for energy applications

250th National Meeting (2015)

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