Recently, the interest in the preparation of inorganic hollow particles has been emerged considerably because of their potential applicability in various fields such as drug delivery, catalysis, coatings, composite materials, and other industrial fields. Especially, hollow silica has been most intensively studied one among the various types of inorganic hollow particles. The earlier literature has been reported on the synthesis of hollow silica particles, including spray drying techniques, templating method, and so on. In a typical templating procedure, hollow particles were prepared by coating of the template with a thin layer of the precursor like a sol and a dispersion and subsequent removal of the template via a thermal decomposition or a chemical dissolution. However, thermal removal of the core generally requires high temperature that may give adverse effects on the structure. Therefore the synthetic method for hollow spheres without a template has been recently developed, such as hydrothermal process, O/W emulsion process. Here, we report a facile synthetic method for nano-sized hollow silicate particles using a self emulsion process. By changing experimental conditions such as temperature, solvent, and reaction time, various types of nano-sized silicate particles with controlled porosity could be prepared. Several spectroscopic methods (SEM, TEM, IR, BET, and solid state NMR) have been used to characterize the structure and morphology of silicate particles synthesized.
