August 2001 Ž . Materials Letters 50 2001 57–60 www.elsevier.comrlocatermatlet Porous alumina thin layers using mesophase templating Noureddine Idrissi-Kandri a,b , Andre Ayral a, ) , Michaela Klotz a , ´ Pierre-Antoine Albouy c , Abdeslam El Mansouri a , Arie Van der Lee a , Christian Guizard a a LMPM, UMR CNRS 5635, IEM-UMII, CC047, Place Eugene Bataillon, F34095 Montpellier cedex 5, France ` b Laboratoire de Chimie Minerale, Faculte des Sciences et Techniques Saıss, B.P. 2202-Atlas, Fes, Morocco ´ ´ ¨ ´ c Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, UMR CNRS 8502, UniÕersite de Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay, France ´ Received 3 October 2000; received in revised form 9 November 2000; accepted 14 November 2000 Abstract A method of preparation for alumina thin layers exhibiting an ordered mesoporosity is presented. The synthesis conditions are discussed and the resulting layers are characterised. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Alumina thin layers; Ordered mesoporosity; Mesophase templating 1. Introduction w x Since the first articles of Beck et al. 1,2 on the synthesis of ordered mesoporous silicate by templat- ing effect, a lot of studies have been devoted to this new class of materials. If the initial syntheses used cationic surfactants to form the templating liquid crystal mesophase, the synthesis conditions were then extended to other types of amphiphilic molecules like neutral surfactant or more recently block copoly- w x mers 3,4 . Significant results were also obtained on wx non-silica oxides 5 . The production of crack-free thin layers of single or mixed oxide is now an important challenge to make way for application of these materials in the field of membranes, sensors or ) Corresponding author. Tel.: q 33-467-14-91-43; fax: q 33- 467-14-91-19. Ž . E-mail address: ayral@iemm.univ-montp2.fr A. Ayral . micro-reactors. The sol–gel route has been success- fully applied to prepare ordered mesoporous silica w x layers from diluted gelling solutions 6–8 . In that case, the formation of the templating mesophase occurs with the drying of the layer during the deposi- tion step. In the case of silica layers prepared from highly aqueous sols and using alkyltrimethyl ammo- nium bromides as surfactants, it has been shown that the sol compositions leading to hexagonal layers can be defined from the corresponding water–surfactant binary diagrams, taking into account the volume wx fraction of surfactant in the dried layer 8 . Another important criterion is the mean size of the inorganic clusters just before the deposition. This size must be small enough to allow the formation of the meso- wx phases during drying 8 . These synthesis conditions were extended to other ordered silica layers prepared Ž from other types of surfactants, gemini with two . cationic polar heads or non-ionic block copolymers w x 9,10 . The preparation of ordered porous layers for 00167-577Xr01r$ - see front matter q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Ž . PII: S0167-577X 00 00413-4