Silica and hybrid silica hollow spheres from imidazolium-based templating agents

Hollow or dense silica spheres were synthesized by the hydrolysis-condensation of tetraethoxysilane templated by an ionic liquid crystal. A hydrolysable silylated analog of these ionic liquid crystals was also submitted to a sol-gel reaction in a binary toluene-water mixture, yielding hybrid vesicles. All the materials were fully characterized by solid state NMR, FTIR, electron microscopies, N-2 adsorption-desorption measurements, and their mechanism of formation was assessed thanks to in situ optical microscopy studies.