Authors: Dario A Donatti A Ibañez Ruiz Marcio R Vicelli Dimas R Vollet
Publish Date: 2009/04/10
Volume: 51, Issue: 2, Pages: 222-227
Abstract
Smallangle Xray scattering was used to study the structure of wet gels prepared from cohydrolysis of tetraethoxysilane TEOS and vinyltriethoxysilane VTES in the VTES/VTES + TEOS molar ratio ranging from 0 to 1 The wet gels at pH = 6 behave as a massfractal structure with characteristic size ξ and fractal dimension D both increasing with the amount of VTES from ξ = 678 nm and D = 225 for pure TEOS until an almost homogenous structure with ξ ~ 249 nm and D ~ 285 is obtained for the wet gel prepared with pure VTES The massfractal structures are built up by small primary clusters of characteristic size between ~035 and ~085 nm the size increasing with the quantity of VTES These small particles of the gels are formed by a restructuring process of a few larger macromolecules in the stable sols pH = 2 on passing from the acid to the increasedpH step of the process
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