Carbon Nitride as Reactive Host Material

Hard templating is one the most usual ways to confine solid growth within small space. This way, nano- or mesostructures are achieved which usually exhibit properties strongly differing from the bulk.

The department recently showed that mesoporous carbon nitride provides an easy-to-remove matrix upon thermal decomposition, as well as a solid reactant. This way, inorganic nanoparticles of metal nitrides have been obtained. Our group now focuses on the use of carbon nitride as reactive template for the "one pot" synthesis of mesoporous frameworks based on boron, carbon, and nitrogen elements (Scheme). The poor crystallinity of such materials requires coupling between classical solid characterization techniques such as X Ray Diffraction and specific methods such as solid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (Laboratoire de chimie de la Matière Condensée de Paris).

Reactive hard templating toward boron carbon nitrides enables to tune the composition, the structure, the morphology and the mesoporous texture of the materials. Since boron carbon nitrides exhibit technologically relevant properties, such as hardness, thermal stability, chemical inertness, thermal conductivity, and sorption capacities, our approach provides an efficient way to study the role of structural and textural features on hydrogen uptake of these tough high surface area matrixes (Institut für Anorganische Chemie of the Technische Universität Dresden).

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