Formation of highly ordered mesoporous silica materials adopting lyotropic liquid crystal mesophases

S. A. El-Safty; J. Evans

doi:10.1039/B106077P

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S. A. El-Safty*^a and J. Evans^b

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* Corresponding authors

^a Chemistry Department, Faculty of Science, Tanta University, Tanta, Egypt
E-mail: saes@dec1.tanta.eun.eg

^b Department of Chemistry, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

Abstract

Mesoporous silica materials have been synthesised in strongly acidic media at pH = 1.3 using high concentrations of a non-ionic surfactant (Brij 76) as a structure-directing agent. Well-defined ordered mesoporous silicas with hexagonal (H_I), lamellar (L_∞) and solid phase (S) structure have been prepared at room temperature according to the lyotropic liquid crystalline mesophases of Brij 76. At high temperature (60 °C), highly ordered cubic (Ia3d), cubic (Im3m) and 3-d hexagonal (p6₃/mmc) nanostructured materials have been produced. The synthesised materials were studied by powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) method for nitrogen adsorption/desorption isotherms and surface area measurements. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), XRD and TEM patterns for all materials show well-defined long-range porous architectures. It was found that BET surface area values of the nanostructured materials are reduced upon increasing the temperature of synthesis.

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Article information

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/B106077P
Article type: Paper
Submitted: 10 Jul 2001
Accepted: 07 Oct 2001
First published: 15 Nov 2001

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J. Mater. Chem., 2002,12, 117-123

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