Two different schemes were adopted to fabricate ordered macroporous structures with face centered cubic lattice of air spheres. Monodisperse polymeric latex suspension, which was synthesized by emulsifier-free emulsion polymerization, was mixed with metal oxide ceramic nanoparticles, followed by evaporation-induced self-assembly of the mixed hetero-colloidal particles. After calcination, inverse opal was generated during burning out the organic nanospheres. Inverse opals made of silica or iron oxide were fabricated according to this procedure. Other approach, which utilizes ceramic precursors instead of nanoparticles was adopted successfully to prepare ordered macroporous structure of titania with skeleton structures as well as lithium niobate inverted structures. Similarly, two different schemes were utilized to obtain disordered macroporous structures with random arrays of macropores. Disordered macroporous structure made of indium tin oxide (ITO) was obtained by fabricating colloidal glass of polystyrene microspheres with low monodispersity and subsequent infiltration of the ITO nanoparticles followed by heat treatment at high temperature for burning out the organic microspheres. Similar random structure of titania was also fabricated by mixing polystyrene building block particles with titania nanoparticles having large particle size followed by the calcinations of the samples.

Aqueous gold nanoparticle dispersion was synthesized by chemical reduction method using diethanolamine as reducing agent and polyethyleneimine as dispersion stabilizer. The synthesis conditions for the stable dispersion of the gold nanoparticle suspension were determined by changing the amount of the reducing agent and dispersant during the wet chemical synthesis procedures. The face centered cubic lattice structure of the gold nanoparticles was confirmed by using X-ray diffraction and the morphologies of the nanoparticles were observed by transmission electron microscope. The synthesized gold nanoparticle dispersion was concentrated by evaporating the dispersion medium at room temperature followed by the addition of ethyleneglycol as humectant for the increase of the elastic properties to obtain gold nanoparticle inks for direct ink writing process. The line patterns were obtained with the gold nanoparticle inks during the writing procedures and the morphologies of the fine patterns were observed by scanning electron microscope.