Nanoporous materials give rise to unique molecular sieving capabilities and ultrahigh internal surface areas. Besides providing plenty of active sites and size selectivity for catalytic reactions, nanoporous structure can also act as hosts and templates for the fabrication of quantum dots and quantum wires. We utilize surfactant-templated approaches to prepare high TiO2 and phosphated TiO2 powders with wormhole framework (Figure 1a) and highly order TiO2 films with cubic framework (Figure 1b) and ZnIn2S4 porous submicrospheres with high photocatalytic activities on the degradation of volatile organic compound.
Hydrothermal and solvothermal methods were utilized to grow one-dimensional nanostructured materials. We have prepared many functional nanomaterials with uniform morphology and wonderful properties by using this method, such as hierarchical dendritic nickel sulfide nanostructure(Figure 2a), Ta-doped rutile titania(Figure 2b), Na2V6O16 3H2O nanobelts(Figure 2c).
We developed novel sonochemical methods to synthesize a series of nanoporous transition metal oxide materials including TiO2, CeO2, and CeO2-ZrO2 solid solutions, composites of amorphous titanium oxide and size-tunable SrTiO3 crystals (Figure 3a and 3b).
Recently it has been established that microwave irradiation is becoming an increasingly popular heating method for nanomaterials synthesis. It offers a clean, cheap, and convenient strategy of heating that usually results in higher yields and shorter reaction time. We have recently developed the microwave-enhanced hydrothermal approaches for producing cable-like Ag/C (Figure 4a), Ni nanowires (Figure 4b), colloidal α-Fe2O3 nanorings (Figure 4c).
