Assembly of large area crack free clay porous films

Porous materials with well-defined porosity have advantages in a wide range of applications, including filtration media, catalysis, and electrodes. The bottom-up fabrication of inverse opals have promised to provide those nanostructures, but fabrication of these materials is often plagued with large numbers of defects and macro-scale cracks. Here, we present a method for making nanostructured porous clay films with well defined pore size that are crack free over a large area (multiple cm(2)).