Rapid synthesis of highly ordered Si-MCM-41.

A very short-time synthesis of highly ordered MCM-41 molecular sieve was formulated by using cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) as the template and silica gel from SiliCycle as the silica source. The physical properties of MCM-41 samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), nitrogen physisorption, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The MCM-41 sample prepared in this study exhibited well defined long-range order and good hydrothermal stability. It was demonstrated that reducing the time of self-assembly step to 2 h during the synthesis had no unfavorable effect on the quality of MCM-41 materials.