Synthesis of controlled-porosity ceramics using bicontinuous liquid crystals

Interest in lyotropic surfactant mesophases has expanded into the field of materials science over the last ten years with the development of ordered mesoporous ceramic (OMC) materials that resemble “fossilized” lyotropic liquid crystals (1,2). The ability to control nanometerlevel pore ordering in these ceramics has created exciting opportunities for the application of liquid crystal science in new materials such as low dielectric constant electrical interlayers (3), tailored adsorbents (4), chromatographic packing materials (5), molecular sieve membranes (6), catalysts and catalyst supports (7), enzyme supports (8), sensors, and optical components (9). Bicontinuous pore morphologies hold many advantages for these applications but have been studied rarely due to the relative difficulty of their synthesis (10).