Patchy Templated Synthesis of Macroporous Colloidal Hollow Spheres and Their Application as Catalytic Microreactors.

Porous colloidal hollow spheres have been applied to diversified fields over the past few decades. However, developing simple and efficient methods to prepare such porous hollow spheres with macro pores remains a challenge. To address this problem, we present a patchy templated synthesis route, which can be used to prepare such colloidal hollow spheres that have macro pores through the shells. This was achieved by using patchy poly(styrene-co-sodium styrene sulphonate) (poly(St-NaSS)) spheres as the template and poly(allylamine hydrochloride) as binding molecules. SiO2 can site-selectively only grow on one kind of patches, resulting in the formation of porous hollow spheres. The pore sizes can be tuned from about 50 to 400 nm. The resulting porous hollow spheres have a Janus character so that Au NPs can only be attached to the interior surfaces in situ, which can be used as catalytic microreactors and show the catalytic performance of pore size dependence.