Research Interests

Control synthesis of porous materials, solution combustion synthesis, catalysis, colloid and interface science, synthesis of advanced nanomaterials, chemistry of materials, heat transfer, metal-organic frameworks, and electrochemical energy conversion.

Mesoporous materials with uniform porosity, high crystallinity and small particle size are of considerable interest. Their cost-effective production on a large scale in an efficient manner, however, remains a challenging task for commercialization. My primary research focuses on the highly scalable synthesis of uniform mesoporous materials with tunable porosity and high crystallinity using innovated colloidal solution combustion synthesis (CSCS). CSCS is a bottom-up process to produce nanostructures with controlled pore size on a large scale using colloidal particles in exothermic chemical reaction. In contrast to the other energy intensive wet chemical methods, in CSCS the heating is only required to initiate the reaction, and once it progresses, the reaction becomes self-accelerating without additional energy expenditure. Self-generated heat satisfies the energy requirements for crystalline oxide formation. The addition of a colloid limits combustion to take place in a confined and uniformly distributed nanospace, leading to a highly uniform mesoporous structure after colloid removal. Depending on the size of colloids used, uniform mesoporous oxides with adjustable pore sizes, large surface areas and large pore volumes can be obtained on a large scale (0.5 kg) for various state of the art applications (Figure 1).

Figure 1. (A) TEM and (B) HRTEM images of CeO₂ catalyst synthesized via CSCS.

Selected Publications

1. A.A. Voskanyan*, K.Y. Chan, C.Y.V. Li, Colloidal Solution Combustion Synthesis: Toward Mass Production of a Crystalline Uniform Mesoporous CeO₂ Catalyst with Tunable Porosity, Chem. Mater., 2016, 28, 2768-2775.

2. A.A. Voskanyan*, C.Y.V. Li, K.Y. Chan, L. Gao, Combustion Synthesis of Cr₂O₃ octahedra with a chromium containing metal-organic framework as a sacrificial template, CrystEngComm, 2015, 17, 2620-2623.

Patents

  1. A.A. Voskanyan*, K.Y. Chan, C.Y.V. Li, “Method of Producing a Porous Crystalline     Material with a Highly Uniform Structure” U.S.A. Provisional patent (62/298,033).