Porous nanomaterials: Main vein of agricultural nanotechnology

Over the past decade, owing to key properties such as high surface area, tailorable pore size and excellent accessibility to active sites, porous materials have shown significant potential to improve performance in various technological applications. In the agricultural sector, productivity depends on a large extent on agrochemicals, however conventional systems lack application efficiency, leading to environmental pollution, and related problems. Porous materials were found to be the best suitable carrier to overcome the above disadvantages in the agrochemicals as have the inherent controlled diffusion property. This class of material includes mesoporous silica, metal organic framework, porous carbon, porous polymers, nano-clay, zeolite, biochar, apatite, and calcium carbonate. Each of these materials were explored for the fertilizer, pesticide, and sensing applications. A comprehensive review on developments in agriculture with these porous materials are missing in the literature. To address this, we present in this study a detailed review on the material design, surface area, release or diffusion kinetics, crop/pest/disease testing, and device fabrication with porous materials. The porous materials were found to improve the efficiency of the agrochemicals, which hope to reduce the load of agrochemicals; on the other hand, the sensitivity of the agricultural sensors was improved with the use of porous material. Further, the agro application with the porous material can be improved with the advanced porous structures and few areas, where the application of the porous material is not realized yet is highlighted at the end. Here, the recommendations for future research have been discussed with the reference from the related area to better understand the underlying science and to develop better agrochemical delivery and sensing methods using porous materials.