A "teardown" method to create large mesotunnels on the pore walls of ordered mesoporous silica.
A "teardown" method to create large mesotunnels (approximately 9 nm) on the pore walls of ordered mesoporous silicas is demonstrated by digesting the organic constituents from polymer-silicate nanocomposites. The ordered mesostructured polymer-silicate composites were first obtained via the evaporation-induced triconstituent co-assembly method by using a low-molecular-weight phenolic resin (resols) as an organic precursor; prehydrolyzed TEOS as an inorganic precursor, and triblock copolymer F127 as a template. All of organic components including F127 and phenolic resins are removed by the microwave digestion (MWD) method from mesostructured polymer-silica composites. While the removal of triblock copolymer F127 generates main pore channels, the phenolic resins can also be torn down from the pore walls, yielding mesotunnels between the channels. The resulting silica products exhibit ordered 2-D hexagonal mesostructure, large pore volume (up to 1.92 cm(3)/g), and very large pore size (up to 22.9 nm), which is even larger than their mesostructural cell parameter (14.2 nm). TEM images confirm the existence of mesotunnels on the silica pore walls. FT-IR and (29)Si solid-state NMR results reveal that these silica products have a large number of silanol groups.
Gu
Dong
D
Department of Chemistry, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Molecular Catalysis and Innovative Materials, and Laboratory of Advanced Materials, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, PR China.
Zhang
Fuqiang
F
Shi
Yifeng
Y
Zhang
Fan
F
Wu
Zhangxiong
Z
Deng
Yonghui
Y
Zhang
Lijuan
L
Tu
Bo
B
Zhao
Dongyuan
D
D046529:Microscopy, Electron, Transmission; D008958:Models, Molecular; D015394:Molecular Structure; D011095:Polyethylenes / Q000737:chemistry; D011126:Polypropylenes / Q000737:chemistry; D016062:Porosity; D012822:Silicon Dioxide / Q000737:chemistry*; D017550:Spectroscopy, Fourier Transform Infrared
D011095:Polyethylenes; D011126:Polypropylenes; D012822:Silicon Dioxide; C078661:UCON 50-HB-5100