“The paper presents an overview of some powerful methods for the characterization of solids with nanoscale (1-100 nm) porosity.”

The paper presents an overview of adsorption methods suitable for the characterization of nanostructured inorganic-organic composites as well as a variety of other porous materials. Nanoscale (1-100 nm) materials have recently attracted much attention because of their usefulness in many important areas—such as adsorption, separations, chromatography, and catalysis. It is anticipated that nanoscale materials may bring much advancement in electronics, manufacturing of optical devices and sensors, and so forth. From its very nature, gas adsorption is a method suitable for characterization of the materials that are porous at the nanoscale level by providing information about pore size distribution, pore volume, surface area, and surface properties of nanopores. Recent work indicates that the Angstrom-level accuracy in the nanopore size evaluation from gas adsorption data can be achieved. So, gas adsorption is a powerful tool available for the characterization of nanoporous materials. However, in order to achieve the level of accuracy and reliability suitable for the characterization of novel tailor-made nanoscale materials, one needs to select proper methods of the adsorption data analysis, otherwise the evaluated structural parameters may be significantly inaccurate or even completely erroneous. Our paper was intended to present an overview of the structural features, which can be meaningfully assessed from gas adsorption data for porous materials. Our intention was to make it useful for materials chemists, who are interested in using gas adsorption methods for the study of nanomaterials. We discussed the basic principles of the use of equilibrium adsorption data in the characterization of porous materials. This discussion was intended to help materials scientists to get some meaningful information about their materials just from visual inspection of adsorption isotherm data. In addition, we focused on the selected methods for the calculation of structural parameters from gas adsorption data, including new ones that are particularly reliable and useful. Our paper was based on our experience gained during many years of work in the fields of gas adsorption, adsorption characterization of porous materials, and synthesis of nanoporous materials. The fact that the paper is highly cited suggests that we were able to achieve our goal, that is, that researchers dealing with (nano)porous materials indeed have found our work useful in their materials characterization.

Our paper provides an overview of some recent advances in the determination of pore size and pore size distribution for nanoporous materials. These advances were made by using well-defined ordered nanoporous materials as model adsorbents and advanced computational methods for modeling adsorption in nanoporous media. As discussed above, the concept of the paper was to focus on the adsorption methods that are useful for the characterization of porous solids.

I have been interested in chemistry since my freshman year of high school. My chemistry teacher was so kind in allowing me to do some experiments in the school laboratory during weekends. However, my undergraduate research was extremely important in initiating my interests in interfacial and materials chemistry.

The paper presents an overview of some powerful methods for the characterization of solids with nanoscale (1-100 nm) porosity. Nanopores are pores of dimensions larger than the size of a typical molecule, yet significantly too small to be visible by an optical microscope. The pressure dependence of the uptake of gas by a solid provides much information about the pore structure at the nanoscale level. However, this information is indirect and its meaningful elucidation requires use of proper methods for the data analysis. Our paper presented an overview of some adsorption methods, including recent ones based on the use of model nanoporous solids and advanced computational modeling that are available for researchers working on the characterization of materials with nanopores.