Carbon-templated silica membranes

Recently, the LbL technique has been extended from conventional nonporous substrates to macroporous substrates, such as 3DOM materials [58,59], macroporous membranes [60-63], and porous calcium carbonate microparticles [64,65], to prepare porous PE-based materials. LbL-assembly of polyelectrolytes can also be performed on the surface of MS particles preloaded with enzymes [66,67] or small molecule drugs [68], and, under appropriate solution conditions, within the pores of MS particles to generate polymer-based nanoporous spheres following removal of the silica template [69]. 

Soft-template technique offers advantage of scalability [39]. In hard-template method, a porous membrane of inorganic or polymeric material serves as a rigid mold for chemical or electrochemical replication of stracture. This method provides an easy marmer for production of 1-D nanostractures, but with difficulties of scale up. Hard templates such as silica or carbon spheres are also ideal for synthesis of hollow strac-tures (11 Chen et al. 2003). Classical examples where the template enables the control of morphology of a-Fe Oj nanoparticles can be found in literature (Table 1). 

OMCs have been synthesized using various templates, including porous zeolites, and anodic alumina membranes, porous silica materials and sdica nanoparticles [51, 52], as weU as different carbon precursor phenoUc resins, furfuryl alcohol, mesophase pitch, sucrose, etc. In Table 7.2 are summarized the characteristic of OMC reported in the literature. 

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