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Updated: Feb 8, 2026

Synthesis and Catalytic Performance of Gold Intercalated in the Walls of Mesoporous Silica
Published on: July 9, 2015
Architecture of yolk-shell structured mesoporous silica nanospheres for catalytic applications
1State Key Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Preparative Chemistry, College of Chemistry, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China. qiaozhenan@jlu.edu.cn wangxue2468@126.com.
Abstract:
We report the design and realization of yolk-shell structured nanospheres with periodic mesoporous organosilica (PMO) nanospheres or noble metal nanoparticles encapsulated in mesoporous silica shells via a selective etching method. These architectures have well controlled structure, size and morphology. The yolk-shell structured PMO@SiO2 nanoparticles can be precisely functionalized with different catalytic functionalities, even incompatible acidic and basic groups: the PMO core with amino (-NH2) groups and the mesoporous silica shell with sulfonic acid (-SO3H) groups. As a nanoreactor, the as-synthesized Au@SiO2 nanospheres show faster reduction of 4-nitrophenol than that of nitrobenzene. Furthermore, the prepared PMO-NH2@SiO2-SO3H nanoparticles can be used as bifunctional catalysts with highly efficient catalytic performance for catalyzing the deacetalization-Henry cascade reaction.
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