A non-invasive method to directly quantify surface heterogeneity of porous materials.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 29472604.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-018-03151-w and PMC identifier 5823877.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
It is extremely challenging to measure the variation of pore surface properties in complex porous systems even though many porous materials have widely differing pore surface properties at microscopic levels. The surface heterogeneity results in different adsorption/desorption behaviors and storage capacity of guest molecules in pores. Built upon the conventional Porod's law scattering theory applicable mainly to porous materials with relatively homogeneous matrices, here we develop a generalized Porod's scattering law method (GPSLM) to study heterogeneous porous materials and directly obtain the variation of scattering length density (SLD) of pore surfaces. As SLD is a function of the chemical formula and density of the matrix, the non-invasive GPSLM provides a way to probe surface compositional heterogeneity, and can be applied to a wide range of heterogeneous materials especially, but not limited to, porous media and colloids, using either neutron or X-ray scattering techniques.