Mesoporous Materials from Novel Silica Source as Heterogeneous Catalyst

Since 1992, when mesoporous molecular sieves in the M41S family were discovered by Mobil’s research group (Kresge et al. 1992; Beck et al. 1992), these materials have attracted signicant attention due to their large surface area, ordered pore-structure array, and narrow pore-size distribution (Shao et al. 2005). There are three categories of M41S divided by different arrays, namely, hexagonal MCM-41 possessing honeycomb arrays of nonintersecting uniformly sized channels, cubic MCM-48 with Ia3d symmetry having a three-dimensional bicontinuous channel system, and unstable lamellar MCM-50, which collapses on template removal (Sayari 1996; Vinu et al. 2003; Hartmann 2005, respectively).