The Preparation of Monodisperse Cationic Polystyrene and its Application to the Synthesis of Hollow Silica Spheres

Xin Jin; Shunsheng Cao; Xinhua Yuan; Weiwei Wu; Jie Hu; Weichen Sheng

doi:10.1071/CH10093

RESEARCH ARTICLE

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The Preparation of Monodisperse Cationic Polystyrene and its Application to the Synthesis of Hollow Silica Spheres

Xin Jin ^A , Shunsheng Cao ^A ^B , Xinhua Yuan ^A , Weiwei Wu ^A , Jie Hu ^A and Weichen Sheng ^A

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A School of Material Science and Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, 212013, China.

^B Corresponding author. Email: sscaochem@hotmail.com

Australian Journal of Chemistry 63(10) 1418-1422 https://doi.org/10.1071/CH10093
Submitted: 19 February 2010 Accepted: 24 April 2010 Published: 1 October 2010

Abstract

The fabrication of hollow spheres with well defined size and morphology has been attracting much attention due to their unique structures and related physicochemical properties. Among the synthetic methods, the template-directed method is particularly interesting and extensively employed to fabricate hollow spheres due to templates available of essentially any size, shape, and chemistry. As a result, a new monodispersed cationic polystyrene (PS) template in this paper was fabricated by using 2-(methacryloyloxy) ethyltrimethylammonium chloride as co-monomer via emulsifier-free polymerization. The template not only can easily be tuned to the size, but can combine the advantages of hard-templating and soft-templating methods. Subsequently, we used cationic PS particles as templates to prepare hollow silica spheres – the results indicated that cationic templates can attract the assembly of tetraethylorthosilicate hydrolyzate on their surface and that the dissolution of templates can be done in the system of silica encapsulation by modification of the reaction conditions.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 20704019) and the advanced professional faculty foundation of Jiangsu University (06jdg054). We thank Professor Kangmin Chen very much for providing much help during this work.

References

The Preparation of Monodisperse Cationic Polystyrene and its Application to the Synthesis of Hollow Silica Spheres

Abstract

Acknowledgements

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