Polymethacrylate-Silica Hybrid Nanoporous Materials: A Bridge Between Inorganic and Polymeric Molecular Sieves

Abstract

Mesoporosity combined with organic polymer functionality and hydrophobicity could give rise to promising new materials with applications in host–guest chemistry and biosensor devices. The synthesis of polymer–silica hybrid mesoporous materials with pore sizes of 3–6 nm is described, in which materials with large specific surface areas (∼800 m2 g–1) and pore volumes (∼0.7 cm3 g–1) as well as relatively narrow pore size distributions are produced by a sol-gel reaction in the presence of a non-surfactant template or pore-forming agent, which is subsequently removed by solvent extraction.