Spherical Mesoporous Metal Oxides with Tunable Orientation Enabled by Growth Kinetics Control

Recent advances in spherical mesoporous metal oxides (SMMOs) have demonstrated their enormous potential in a large variety of research fields. However, a direct creation of these materials with precise control on their key shape features, particularly pore architectures, remains a major challenge as compared to the widely explored counterpart of silica. Here, using Al2O3 as an example, we identified that deposition kinetics in solution played an essential role in the construction of different SMMOs. Specifically, a controlled Al3+ precipitation is critical to maintaining the electrostatic interaction between the inorganic precursors and the molecular templates, thereby achieving a designable assembly of these two components toward uniform mesoporous Al2O3-based nanospheres. We demonstrated that such a synthesis strategy is not only able to precisely control the channel orientations from concentric to radial and dendritic, a synthesis capability impeded so far for SMMOs, but is readily applicable to other metal oxides. Our study showed that the growth-kinetics control is a simple but powerful synthesis protocol and opened up a multifunctional platform to achieve systematic design of SMMOs for their future applications.