Advanced porous borocarbonitride nanoarchitectonics: Their structural designs and applications

Borocarbonitride (BCN) based materials are finding increasing attention for a range of applications owing to their outstanding features. BCN is generally realized through the coupling of carbon and boron nitride (BN) with the latter being analogous to graphene and recognized due to its good electrical/mechanical properties and thermal/chemical stability. Although BCN is widely acknowledged for tunable bandgap, one of its fascinating yet less explored aspects is porosity. The porous features including high surface area and pore size are always favorable factors to enhance the efficiency of non-porous materials. This review is focused on parallel coverage and comparison of BCN and BN in terms of their synthesis methods, structure-property relationships, and application perspectives. This review aims to provide the readers with up-to-date information on the aspects that have not been covered previously. The review also covers the detailed explanation and analysis of various factors affecting the structure and property relationship that could lead to the development of more advanced BCN nanoporous structures. In terms of the application perspectives, emerging fields such as energy storage and conversion and photocatalysis and conventional fields such as adsorption are covered and the review concludes by providing illustrations on current challenges and future directions.