Fundamentals and Design‐Led Synthesis of Emulsion‐Templated Porous Materials for Environmental Applications

Abstract

Emulsion templating is at the forefront of producing a wide array of porous materials that offers interconnected porous structure, easy permeability, homogeneous flow-through, high diffusion rates, convective mass transfer, and direct accessibility to interact with atoms/ions/molecules throughout the exterior and interior of the bulk. These interesting features together with easily available ingredients, facile preparation methods, flexible pore-size tuning protocols, controlled surface modification strategies, good physicochemical and dimensional stability, lightweight, convenient processing and subsequent recovery, superior pollutants remediation/monitoring performance, and decent recyclability underscore the benchmark potential of the emulsion-templated porous materials in large-scale practical environmental applications. To this end, many research breakthroughs in emulsion templating technique witnessed by the recent achievements have been widely unfolded and currently being extensively explored to address many of the environmental challenges. Taking into account the burgeoning progress of the emulsion-templated porous materials in the environmental field, this review article provides a conceptual overview of emulsions and emulsion templating technique, sums up the general procedures to design and fabricate many state-of-the-art emulsion-templated porous materials, and presents a critical overview of their marked momentum in adsorption, separation, disinfection, catalysis/degradation, capture, and sensing of the inorganic, organic and biological contaminants in water and air.

Hydrophilic macroporous monoliths with tunable water uptake capacity fabricated by water‐in‐oil high internal phase emulsion templating

“…HIPE has been widely used as soft template for preparing interconnected macroporous polymeric monoliths, namely so-called polyHIPE. [1][2][3][4][5][6] Hierarchically porous structure, including quasi-spherical voids and numerous smaller interconnecting windows between adjacent voids, enables a variety of applications of polyHIPEs, such as tissue engineering scaffolds, 7,8 water treatment materials, [9][10][11][12][13] and catalyst carriers. [14][15][16] Recent years, research interests of polyHIPEs have been very broad, ranging from morphology regulation to functionality tuning.…”

Progress in the Application of Food-Grade Emulsions

“…To date, emulsion-templated porous materials have been used for a range of applications [ 327 ]. Jiao et al [ 181 ] stabilized HIPEs using peanut protein microgel particles, revealing that these emulsions can be rendered suitable for various applications simply by changing the composition of the internal phase.…”

Use of Emulsion-Templated, Highly Porous Polyelectrolytes for In Vitro Germination of Chickpea Embryos: a New Substrate for Soilless Cultivation

“… 4 , 11 In addition to high absorption capacity, some of the PE-PHs also exhibited exceptional water retention properties under compression (up to 60% strains) and then even recovered to their original heights upon the removal of stress without failing. 4 Due to these excellent properties, the potential applications of these PE-PHs are therefore wide-ranging and include environmental applications for removing contaminants from water, 20 fire-retardant materials, 7 desiccants for organic solvents, 16 or scaffolds for tissue engineering applications. 21 Despite their unique water absorption/retention properties, the use of PE-PHs in agriculture and horticulture is surprisingly low, although these materials could ease the burden of water shortage in a dry soil.…”