Synthesis and application of melamine-based dendrimer/sba-15 hybrid materials

Porous inorganic materials that can be used in applications such as catalysis and separations have been intensely studied due to their potential stability, ease of recovery and high surface areas. Organic-inorganic hybrid materials meet these criteria by exploiting the physical robustness of porous inorganic materials and the chemical functionality of organic materials. While amorphous oxides are widely used industrially as inorganic supports, disordered pore structures make them difficult to characterize. Ordered-mesoporous-silica (OMS), such as SBA-15, that have ordered pores structures simplify characterization and are useful models for studying hybrid materials. Dendrimers, once appropriately functionalized, have high densities of uniformly distributed functional groups. In this thesis, melamine-based dendrimer/SBA-15 hybrids were synthesized and characterized using a wide range of analytical techniques. This thesis shows that the porosity can be independently altered by varying 1) the dendrimer generation, 2) the linker molecule, and 3) the surface amine loading. Cu(II) sequestration results demonstrate that the peripheral functional groups of the dendrimer are readily accessible for binding. This thesis also describes preliminary work toward preparing an enantioselective catalyst using L-proline supported on OMS. This work includes the synthesis and testing of three dendrimer-like proline derivatives. Future work in this area is outlined and will include synthesizing catalysts based on the dendrimer hybrid system previously described. Solution dendrimer syntheses will also be performed to create solution-based catalysts.