Nano Express
A combination of hard and soft templating for the fabrication of silica hollow microcoils with nanostructured walls
1 International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL), Av. Mestre José Veiga, Braga, 4715-310, Portugal
2 Instituto de Química Avanzada de Cataluña. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IQAC-CSIC), Jordi Girona 18-26, Barcelona, 08034, Spain
3 Graduate Institute of Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, 43 Keelung Road, Section 4, Taipei, Taiwan
4 Departamento de Química Física, Facultad de Química, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, 15782, Spain
5 Toyota Physical & Chemical Research Institute, Nagakute, Aichi, 480-1192, Japan
Nanoscale Research Letters 2011, 6:330 doi:10.1186/1556-276X-6-330
Published: 13 April 2011Abstract
Hollow silica microcoils have been prepared by using functionalized carbon microcoils as hard templates and surfactant or amphiphilic dye aggregates as soft templates. The obtained materials have been characterized by electron and optical microscopy, nitrogen sorption and small angle X-ray scattering. The obtained hollow microcoils resemble the original hard templates in shape and size. Moreover, they have mesoporous walls (pore size ≈ 3 nm) with some domains where pores are ordered in a hexagonal array, originated from surfactant micelles. The obtained silica microcoils also show preferential adsorption of cationic fluorescent dyes. A mechanism for the formation of silica microcoils is proposed.
