A facile route to a silica monolith with ordered mesopores and tunable through pores by using hydrophilic urea formaldehyde resin as a template

In this paper, bi-continuous silica monolith with highly ordered mesopores and tunable through pores (macropores or macro channels) has been successfully synthesized through nanocasting method. The starting urea formaldehyde (UF) resin, which is hydrophilic and contains adjustable through pores in micrometer scale, was for the first time used as a hard template in nanocasting. The silica replica has the same macroscopic morphology and macropore structure as the starting UF resin template, indicating that the macropores in silica monolith could also be adjusted. More interestingly, long-range ordered domains with highly ordered mesopores of hexagonal arrays existed in the frameworks of the silica monolith.