A New Mesoporous Magnesium Borate Microsphere Synthesized Using Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate as Template

Abstract

In this paper, we report a simple strategy for fabricating mesoporous magnesium borate (2MgO·B2O3) microspheres. We employed sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) in one system, as a template for the controlled growth of mesoporous 2MgO·B2O3microspheres. The products were characterized by XRD, SEM, TEM, EDS, N2sorption and FT-IR. SEM and TEM observations indicate magnesium borate products are composed of a large number of hollow microspheres, with diameters of 1.0~1.5 μm, which are in fact built from fibers with lengths of 100~150 nm. The N2sorption results show that the products have meso-structures. The average pore diameter is 27 nm. The BET surface area is about 53.03 m2/g, and the pore volume is 0.37 m3/g. It was found that SDS plays a key role for the formation of mesoporous structure. A possible mechanism was proposed to interpret the formation of the mesoporous structure. The mesopores will endow the hierarchical microspheres with novel application potentials.