Preparation and characterization of highly monodisperse vinyl functionalized silica spheres by sol-gel method

Highly monodisperse and uniform-size vinyl functiona-lized silica spheres were synthesized directly from vinyltriethoxysilane (VTES) in water/ethanol mixed solution, and in this system, we successfully controlled the size and shape of hybrid silica spheres by adjusting the concentrations of the precursor VTES and catalyst ammonia. On the basis of the experiment results, it was found that hybrid spheres size significantly increased as the increment of concentration of VTES. However, increasing ammonia concentration resulted in decreasing of diameter of hybrid silica spheres from 542 to 272 nm. The morphologies and structure were determined by Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM) and Fourier transformed infrared (FT-IR).