Novel Strategy To Prepare Hierarchically Porous Ceramic Microspheres via a Self-Assembly Method on Tunable Superamphiphobic Surfaces

Porous ceramic microspheres have been widely used in many fields such as drug delivery, chemical catalysis, environmental protection, noise reduction by absorption, and separation and purification. However, the methodology to prepare porous ceramic microspheres based on traditional colloidal processing routes faces the problems of precise control of the diameter degree of sphericity, uniforiiiity of the microstructure (size, porosity, shape, etc.), and so forth. Herein, we propose a new methodology to prepare hierarchically porous ceramic micro spheres with a mechanism based on the superwettability strategy without the requirement of any special equipment or complicated procedures. In such an approach, a ceramic emulsion with an extremely low viscosity was prepared by an emulsion-assisted self assembly method, which would be repelled on the superamphiphobic surface to. form a submillimeter-sized Al2O3 microsphere. Compared with the traditional colloidal processing approaches to prepare ceramic microspheres, the homogeneity. and precision of the ceramic microspheres prepared via our approach are much finer, whileour approach is quite simple, highly efficient, and cost-saving. Moreover, the diameter of the microspheres and the microstructure of the pores (size, density, porosity, etc.) in the ceramic microspheres could be flexibly manipulated. Our ethodology has solved the key problems in the preparation of ceramic microspheres which have not been solved in the past