Preparation of Spherical Silica by Water/oil Microemulsion with Minimal Oil Content

Abstract

We prepared spherical silica by minimizing the amount of oil through water/oil (W/O) emulsion. The spherical silica was successfully synthesized by using 20 to 60 mL of hexane as an oil for 283 g of water glass. The size of silica was dependent on the amount of oil where the size of silica particles increased as the amount of oil increased. The specific surface areas of samples measured using the BET method were 186 to 230 m(2)/g. X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis results showed that the SiO2 content was more than 90% while sodium was 3.27 similar to 4.5 wt. %. The spherical silica prepared in this study could be optimized for mass synthesis and commercialization because the industrial sodium silicate solution was used as a precursor of Si as well as the minimum amounts of hexane and nonionic surfactant were employed.