New route for producing crack-free xerogels: Obtaining uniform pore size |
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Authors: | María J. Mosquera Desireé M. de los Santos Lucila Valdez-Castro Luis Esquivias |
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Affiliation: | 1. Departamento de Química-Física, Facultad de Ciencias, Campus Universitario Río San Pedro, Universidad de Cádiz, 11510 Puerto Real, Cádiz, Spain;2. Departamento de Física de la Materia Condensada, Facultad de Ciencias, Campus Universitario Río San Pedro, Universidad de Cádiz, 11510 Puerto Real, Cádiz, Spain |
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Abstract: | We propose an innovative strategy to obtain crack-free gels by using a surfactant as a template for the silica pores. We use a neutral surfactant – n-octylamine – which weakly interacts by hydrogen bonding with the silica precursor. This allows it to be removed by simple drying in ambient air. We investigate the effect of the surfactant in simple inorganic silica obtained from tetraethoxysilane (TEOS) and an organic–inorganic hybrid xerogel, containing TEOS and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), as precursors. Although both the syntheses promote the formation of a crack-free uniform mesoporous silica gel, the hybrid gel network exhibits a larger pore size than the gel containing exclusively the silica from TEOS. |
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