Stepwise Monomicelle Assembly for Highly Ordered Mesoporous TiO Membranes with Precisely Tailored Mesophase and Porosity.

Mesoporous materials with crystalline frameworks have been acknowledged as very attractive materials in various applications. Nevertheless, due to the cracking issue during crystallization and incompatible hydrolysis and assembly, the precise control for crystalline mesoscale membranes is quite infertile. Herein, we presented an ingenious stepwise monomicelle assembly route for the syntheses of highly ordered mesoporous crystalline TiO membranes with delicately controlled mesophase, mesoporosity, and thickness. Such a process involves the preparation of monomicelle hydrogels and follows self-assembly by stepwise solvent evaporation, which enables the sensitive hydrolysis of TiO oligomers and dilatory micelle assembly to be united. In consequence, the fabricated mesoporous TiO membranes exhibit a broad flexibility, including tunable ordered mesophases (worm-like, hexagonal to body-centered cubic ), controlled mesopore sizes (3.0-8.0 nm), and anatase grain sizes (2.3-8.4 nm). Besides, such mesostructured crystalline TiO membranes can be extended to diverse substrates (Ti, Ag, Si, FTO) with tailored thickness. The great mesoporosity of the fabricated mesoscopic membranes also affords excellent pseudocapacitive behavior for sodium ion storage. This study underscores a novel pathway for balancing the interaction of precursors and micelles, which could have implications for synthesizing crystalline mesostructures in higher controllability.