A General Synthesis Strategy for Hollow Metal Oxide Microspheres Enabled by Gel-Assisted Precipitation.

Hollow metal oxide microspheres (HMMs) have drawn enormous attention in different research fields. Reliable and scalable synthetic protocols applicable for a large variety of metal oxides are in emergent demand. Here we demonstrated that polymer hydrogel, such as the resorcinol formaldehyde (RF) one, existed as an efficient synthetic platform to build HMMs. Specifically, the RF gel forms stacked RF microspheres enlaced with its aqueous phase, where the following evaporation of the highly dispersed water leads to a gel-assisted precipitation (GAP) of the dissolved metal precursor onto the embedded polymeric solids suited for the creation of HMMs. By taking advantage of the structural features of hydrogel, this synthesis design avoids the delicate control on the usually necessitated coating process and provides a simple and effective synthetic process versatile for functional HMMs, particularly Nb2 O5 as a high-performance electrode material in Li-ion intercalation pseudocapacitor.

One-nanometer-precision control of Al(2)O(3) nanoshells through a solution-based synthesis route.

Forming uniform metal oxide nanocoatings is a well-known challenge in the construction of core-shell type nanomaterials. Herein, by using buffer solution as a specific reaction medium, we demonstrate the possibility to grow thin nanoshells of metal oxides, typically Al2 O3 , on different kinds of core materials, forming a uniform surface-coating layer with thicknesses achieving one nanometer precision. The application of this methodology for the surface modification of LiCoO2 shows that a thin nanoshell of Al2 O3 can be readily tuned on the surface for an optimized battery performance.

A facile synthetic strategy for the creation of hollow noble metal/transition metal oxide nanocomposites.

We have reported an efficient synthetic protocol to build different hollow hybrid nanocomposites with tunable compositions, such as Au/TiO2, Pt/ZrO2, and Au/CexTi1-xO2. The noble metal nanoparticles were well encapsulated in a wall composed of the designated transition metal oxides, showing promising potential as stable catalysts as demonstrated by Pt/ZrO2 for methane combustion.