We chose dipicolinic acid as a tridentate chelating unit featuring ONO donors to react with lanthanide(III) ions to yield tight and protective N(3)O(6) environments around the lanthanide(III) ions. We immobilized the lanthanide(III)-dipicolinic acid complexes on colloidal mesoporous silica with diameter smaller than 100 nm by a covalent bond grafting technique and obtained nearly monodisperse l...

Mesoporous silica metal oxide (ZnO and CdO) thin films have been used as metal ion precursors to produce the first examples of mesoporous silica metal sulfide (meso-SiO(2) @ZnS, meso-SiO(2) @CdS) or silica metal selenide (meso-SiO(2) @ZnSe, meso-SiO(2) @CdSe) thin films, in which the pore walls are made up of silica and metal sulfide or metal selenide nanoflakes, respectively. A gentle chemical...

A novel hard templating strategy for the synthesis of high quality multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) with a uniform diameter was developed. MWCNTs were successfully synthesized through chemical vapour deposition (CVD) using acetylene by employing 3D bicontinuous mesoporous silica (KIT-6) as a hard template and used as the counter electrode in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). Here, we re...

Highly ordered mesoporous polymer-silica and carbon-silica nanocomposites with interpenetrating networks have been successfully synthesized by the evaporation-induced triconstituent co-assembly method, wherein soluble resol polymer is used as an organic precursor, prehydrolyzed TEOS is used as an inorganic precursor, and triblock copolymer F127 is used as a template. It is proposed for the firs...

Large-pore mesoporous silica microspheres with tailored pore sizes were prepared via a two-step synthesis process by using a triblock copolymer EO20PO70EO20 as template in combination with a cosurfactant cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) and a cosolvent ethanol. The obtained mesoporous silica spheres were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy ...

Sol-gel copolymer-templated mesoporous silica films with a thickness of 70 nm and interpore spacing of 4.34 nm were fabricated on gold layer covered glass substrates for application as a wavelength-interrogated surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor. The resonance wavelength (λ(R)) of the sensor with a solution sample was determined by absorptiometry at a given incident angle. A comparison betw...

The acid-catalyzed synthesis of highly ordered mesostructured materials has led to a variety of twoand three-dimensional periodic symmetries, and has proven to be an effective route for the generation of fibers, spheres, thin films, and other monolithic forms of mesoporous materials. Zhao et al. recently used non-ionic poly(alkylene oxide) block copolymers, under acidic conditions, to prepare w...

Adsorption of methanol and ethanol over mesoporous siliceous material are studied in the current paper. The pure mesoporous silica is prepared using tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS) as silica source and dodecylamine as template at low pH. The prepared material was characterized using nitrogen adsorption,nX-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The adsorption kinetics of me...

Highly ordered mesoporous CdS nanowire arrays were synthesized by using mesoporous silica as hard template and cadmium xanthate (CdR(2)) as a single precursor. Upon etching silica, mesoporous CdS nanowire arrays were produced with a yield as high as 93 wt%. The nanowire arrays were characterized by XRD, N(2) adsorption, TEM, and SEM. The results show that the CdS products replicated from the me...