Bottom-Up Routes to Porous Silicon Carbide

We report on constructive methods providing a large range of high purity porous SiC products. All methods are based on modified sol-gel processes combined with carbothermal re¬duction. We obtain monodisperse regular pores of well defined diameters by using carbon sphere templates which are removed after SiC infiltration. A different way is a sol-gel based conversion of graphite bodies into SiC, which transfers the porosity from the graphite matrix into the final SiC product. Thus a large variety of porosity features are available, originating either from natural poro¬sity of graphite or from priorly created nano-/ microstructures in the carbonaceous base material. Whereas all our pristine porous sol-gel derived silicon carbide products are semi-insulating, doping is possible, during the growth to modifiy the electrical and optical properties.