Formation And Properties Of Bionic Porous Materials

Biomineralization is the process that organisms enrich the inorganic particles all around.Diatoms are the typical example of this organic-inorganic hybrid process,which can structuralize the dissociative silicon in the water to build their porous ordered arrays bones(or cellular wall) by organisms.These porous materials attracted many researchers since the diatoms were sawn by microscope in the 16th century,which are potential to be applied in the fields of adsorption,separation and optical materials.Here, the mesporous silica materials were prepared via the sol-gel method to mimic the effects of cellular structures.Firstly,when the self-assemblies of L-phenylalanine derivate were used as the templates to prepare sillica nanostructures,the mixture of trumpet shell and cocoon were obtained on nano-scale,which indicated that hierarchical silica architectures can be controlled through a single-templating process.Secondly,several kinds of hierarchical silicas were obtained by using other amino acid derivates.At the same time,the mechanism of the formation of the nanostructure was studied using TEM at different reaction time,which help us have a better understanding of the formation of the natural diatom backbones.Finally,other silica nanostructures were controlled using the self-assemblies of several other amino acid derivates.