NANOPOROUS MATERIALS - SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

Porous materials are of scientific and technological importance because of the presence of voids of controllable dimensions at the atomic, molecular, and nanometer scales, enabling them to discriminate and interact with molecules and clusters. Interestingly the big deal about this class of materials is about the "nothingness" within the pore space. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) classifies porous materials into three categories micropores of less than 2 nm in diameter, mesopores between 2 and 50 nm, and macropores of greater than 50 nm. In this book, nanoporous materials are defined as those porous materials with pore diameters less than 100 nm. Over the last decade, there has been an ever increasing interest and research effort in the synthesis, characterization, functionalization, molecular modeling and design of nanoporous materials.