A Fast Way for Preparing Crack-Free Mesostructured Silica Monolith

Large-sized, crack-free silica monoliths with highly ordered mesostructure are prepared by a fast and easy way via liquid-paraffin-medium protected solvent evaporation. By employing the inert liquid paraffin as the morphology “protector”, cracks of the materials can be successfully avoided and the processing time can be reduced to 8 h. The block copolymer−silica composite monoliths are transparent and crack-free with a large size. The mesoporous silica monoliths have been characterized by small-angle powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and nitrogen adsorption, which show that the materials have a highly ordered hexagonal mesostructure of space group p 6 mm and narrow pore size distribution, with a mean pore diameter of 5.65 nm. In addition, metal ions can be easily doped into the monoliths, indicating potential optical, electronic, magnetic, and catalytic properties. This fast synthetic method is valuable for the applications of mesostructured silica monoliths in optics and separation.