Supramolecular interactions and morphology control in microwave synthesis of nanoporous materials

Application of a microwave technique to the conventional hydrothermal process is gaining importance, especially, in the synthesis of nanoporous materials. This microwave technique is regarded as a novel synthesis tool because it gives several beneficial advantages such as homogeneous nucleation, rapid synthesis, formation of uniform crystals, and small crystallites, facile morphology control, energy efficiency and so on. Recently, it was found that it offers an efficient way to control the crystal morphology, size and orientation, and even crystalline phase which are required for many emerging applications of nanoporous materials. This review summarizes recent work on the microwave effect, supramolecular interactions and control of crystal morphology upon microwave synthesis of nanoporous materials performed by the present authors. Synthesis and morphology control of nanoporous materials such as ZSM-5, zeolite beta, metallosilicates, AlPO, MCM-41, SBA-15, SBA-16, etc. have been accomplished with microwave irradiation. In particular, the rapid nucleation and crystallization of ZSM-5 zeolite under microwave irradiation made it possible to enable the continuous microwave synthesis, implying a great industrial and technological importance. The formation of nanoporous materials, especially, silicate or aluminosilicate molecular sieves was described on the basis of supramolecular interactions between organic template molecules and silicate species under microwave irradiation. Besides decreasing synthesis time, it was duly demonstrated that the microwave technique provides an effective way to control particle size distribution and macroscopic morphology in the synthesis. Moreover, for the application of these porous materials, microwave-induced nanofabrication of microporous and mesoporous materials is more important than that of simple porous materials.