Large-Scale
Roll-to-Roll Fabrication of Ordered Mesoporous
Materials using Resol-Assisted Cooperative Assembly
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Abstract
Roll-to-roll (R2R) processing enables
the rapid fabrication of
large-area sheets of cooperatively assembled materials for production
of mesoporous materials. Evaporation induced self-assembly of a nonionic
surfactant (Pluronic F127) with sol–gel precursors and phenolic
resin oligomers (resol) produce highly ordered mesostructures for
a variety of chemistries including silica, titania, and tin oxide.
The cast thick (>200 μm) film can be easily delaminated from
the carrier substrate (polyethylene terephthalate, PET) after cross-linking
the resol to produce meter-long self-assembled sheets. The surface
areas of these mesoporous materials range from 240 m<sup>2</sup>/g
to >1650 m<sup>2</sup>/g with these areas for each material comparing
favorably with prior reports in the literature. These R2R methods
provide a facile route to the scalable production of kilograms of
a wide variety of ordered mesoporous materials that have shown potential
for a wide variety of applications with small-batch syntheses