Interaction of PEG with ionic surfactant SDS to form template for mesoporous material

In this article a possible mechanism is proposed of the interaction of PEG with an ionic surfactant of sodium dodecylsulphate (SDS) to form composite swelling agent for mesoporous material preparation. With the dynamic light scattering method the sizes of the micelle formed by PEG itself or by PEG and SDS were examined. The result shows that pure 5 wt.% PEG 8000 solution has the micelles with size of 700 nm, whereas after the addition of 0.4 wt.% SDS the micelles decrease to 29.4 nm. The contraction of the micelle size can be illustrated as the interaction between the polymer and the surfactant. And through the adjustment of chain length of the polymer as well as the concentration of polymer and ionic surfactant, tunable micelles can be obtained with diverse sizes, charges and aggregate numbers. When this composite micelle was used for the preparation of porous materials, a uniform pore distribution was obtained similar to those with hydrothermal method. Moreover, a nicely spherical morphology thanks to the chain of polymer was also observed. Therefore, PEG proposes a possible route to synthesize mesoporous materials with excellent micro-mechanism and macrostructure.