A new route to synthesis of surface hydrophobic silica with long-chain alcohols in water phase

In this paper, we present a new route to synthesis of surface hydrophobic silica with long-chain alcohols in water phase at low temperature. The degree of surface modification can be controlled by adjusting the pH of the solution, reaction temperature, chain length of the modifier and the weight ratio of modifier to silica. A reasonable “water bridge” reaction mechanism is proposed based on the experimental results. More experiments prove that this new method is effective for pure amorphous silica samples of different modes of preparation.