Multifunctional dendritic mesoporous silica nanospheres loaded with silver nanoparticles as a highly active and recyclable heterogeneous catalyst

• A multifunctional dendritic silica nanocatalyst was successfully fabricated by an oil–water biphase stratification coating strategy.
• The dendritic silica nanomaterials Dendritic-mSiO2 were chosen as the catalyst’s support for the first time.
• The as-synthesized nanocatalyst exhibited excellent catalytic activity and reusability due to easy accessibility of active sites.

In this work, a multifunctional dendritic silica nanocatalyst Dendritic-mSiO2-NH2-Ag with easy accessibility of active sites and high surface area was successfully developed by an oil–water biphase stratification coating strategy, and characterized by transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, X-Ray photoelectron spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, N2 adsorption–desorption, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The as-synthesized nanocatalyst Dendritic-mSiO2-NH2-Ag showed excellent catalytic activity for the catalytic reduction of 4-nitrophenol and 2-nitroaniline using sodium borohydride in aqueous solution at room temperature owing to easy accessibility of active sites. Additionally, the novel catalyst could be conveniently recovered from the reaction system and recycled for at least five times without obvious loss in activity. These results indicate that the aforementioned approach based on dendritic silica Dendritic-mSiO2 provided a promising platform for the fabrication of noble metal nanocatalysts with easy accessibility and excellent catalytic activity, which could be highly efficient in various catalytic reduction reactions.

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