Direct Synthesis and Tuning of Highly Porous Boron Nitride: Towards a New Class of Adsorbent

Porous boron nitride (BN) is being established as a new class of high performance adsorbent materials, primarily due to its high thermal and chemical stability along with its bond polarity. This permits a wide range of possible applications for BN, owing to its tolerance to extreme conditions. However, control over the porosity of BN has thus far proven difficult to achieve, limiting BN’s potential in the field of adsorption.

Herein, we present how a series of porous BN samples with exceptional and tunable surface area and pore volume was produced via a simple and cost effective template-free method. We examine their chemical and structural features from the nano- to the macro-scale using a range of analytical techniques. In particular, we show how state-of-the art 3D tomography techniques could directly visualize the pore network. The highest surface area samples showed promising performances for high pressure gas sorption applications. A number of analyses were conducted to identify the mechanisms behind the pore formation and the porosity enhancement involved in this new synthetic approach. Overall, our study provides fundamental knowledge on the formation of porous BN as well as a facile and reproducible method for its synthesis.