Hierarchical Metal Foams of Large Surface Area via Facile Electrochemical Techniques

Featuring high thermal and electrical conductivities, light weight, attractive mechanicalproperties and low cost, 3D bulk metal foams hold great promise for various applications.However, the low surface area of current metal foams has largely limited theirperformance and applications, e.g., as supporting frameworks/charge collectors forelectrode materials and photocatalysts. On the other hand, there is a lack of efficientand economical methods to effectively increase the surface area of metal foams. Here wepropose a facile method for greatly increasing the surface area of metal foams usinglow-cost electrochemical treatments (e.g., repetitively alternated electrodeposition anddealloying). Taking Cu foams as an example, high surface area Cu foams will befabricated using this convenient electrochemical method in a one-pot one-step manner.The roughness or specific surface area of the metal foams will be easily tunable byvarying the electrochemical parameters, e.g., the cycle numbers. As chargecollectors/supporting substrates, the advanced Cu foams will enable improvedperformance for various applications, such as surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy(SERS), biosensing, photocatalysis, and supercapacitors.