Facile synthesis of hierarchically porous silica nanocapsules and nanospheres via vesicle templating

In this paper, we report a facile synthesis of mesoporous silica nanomaterials by utilizing cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB)/sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate (SDBS) vesicle systems as templates. The porous nanostrucures with varied morphologies, including nanocapsules and nanospheres can be successfully fabricated by simply regulating the volume ratio (R) of ethanol to ethyl ether. In addition, we also investigated the influences of vesicular solution concentration on the nanomaterial morphologies with two different vesicle systems. A vesicle-templating mechanism was proposed to explain the formation of porous silica nanostructures.

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► A facile path to fabricate hierarchically mesoporous silica particles was explored.
► Vesicle bilayer or chamber was simply used as compartmentalized reaction space.
► The variation of sample morphology was achieved by changing co-solvent volume.
► The vesicle concentration also greatly affects the physical property of materials.