Titanium alkoxides immobilized on magnetic mesoporous silica nanoparticles and their characterization by solid state voltammetry techniques: Application in ring opening polymerization

In this paper, we present the synthesis of mesoporous silica coated Fe3O4 core shell nanoparticles or magnetic mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MMSNs) via a surfactant templated sol-gel method using magnetite nanoparticles (MNPs) stabilized with tartrate as nucleation seeds. The synthetic parameters have been carefully controlled in order to scale up the synthetic procedure to obtain more than 1 g of stable, high quality core shell and biocompatible MMSNs per synthesis. MMSNs have been used as support to prepare heterogeneous titanium catalysts for ring opening polymerization (ROP) of epsilon-caprolactone. The prepared materials have been fully characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF) N-2 adsorption-desorption, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), thermogravimetric analysis (TG-DTG), UV vis and DRUV-vis techniques. In addition, extensive solid state electrochemical studies have been carried out in aqueous and organic medium demonstrating the coating of MNPs with a layer of mesoporous silica and the immobilization of titanium as electroactive species. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.