Facile Hydrothermal Fabrication of Nano-Oxide Hollow Spheres using Monosaccharides as Sacrificial Templates

In the last decade, hollow materials have gained increasing attention as a special class of materials compared with their solid counterparts owing to their unique properties such as their low density, large specific surface area, stability, surface permeability, and hollow structure. These features make them important from both a scientific and technological point of view. Owing to their unique and enhanced properties, these materials have the potential for widespread applications in the protection of sensitive species (e.g. enzymes and other proteins), catalysis, and encapsulation of chemicals (e.g. for the controlled-release of drugs, cosmetics, inks, and dyes). My original goal in this dissertation was to present a facile, environmentally benign, economically sustainable, and additive-free synthetic protocol for the fabrication of hollow oxides, which could ultimately enable the fine-tuning of hollow inorganic materials. The synthesis was achieved via a facile one-pot hydrothermal strategy with the use of simple sugars (glucose or fructose) as sacrificial templates (Scheme 1). A series of experiments was performed in which various porous metals and ceramic oxide hollow spheres were obtained as final products via a hydrothermal approach. The obtained hollow oxides were characterized by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), infrared (IR) spectroscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectroscopy, and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) method to obtain a nitrogen sorption isotherm. The first part of this thesis presents a brief introduction and describes a broad range of various applications of hollow inorganic materials. Also, some light has been thrown on the synthetic approaches