Micro‐ and Mesoporous Materials: On the way to Applications

Porous materials with pore diameters of a few tenths of a nanometre (microporous materials) and with pore diameters between a few nanometres and a few tens of nanometres (mesoporous materials) have a very wide range of applications. Their particularly important properties are large surface areas, adsorption capacities, and shape selectivity for molecules. A well-known and immensely exploited class of microporous materials are zeolites. These are aluminosilicate materials built of AlO4 and SiO4 tetrahedra, which are connected through common oxygen vertices into many different porous structures.1 Zeolites are extensively used as catalysts in oil and gas refinement, because they contain catalytically active acid sites due to the aluminium within their frameworks.

Over the past two decades researchers have attempted to improve the efficiency of zeolites in order to extend their range of applications and to tailor their properties for specific applications. These attempts included the modification of zeolites with small amounts of (transition-) metal ions to generate redox sites within them2 and the

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