Poly(ionic liquid) Core Turns Hollow Silica Spheres into Amphiphilic Nanoreactor in Water

Abstract

The stressing environmental concerns push us to move traditional organic reactions toward an eco-friendly way. Replacing organic solvents by water seems to be a promising solution yet is very challenging. The main obstacle is the poor solubility of many hydrophobic substrates in water, leading to a restricted accessibility, thus inevitably ending up with low reaction rates. To overcome this problem, we propose a hybrid micelle-like hydrophobic@hydrophilic nanoreactor formed by a poly(ionic liquid) (PIL) core and a mesoporous silica shell. This nanoreactor exhibited high activity (TOF up to 414 h–1, 12.9 times of that for a corresponding silica catalyst) and selectivity (100%) in the oxidation of benzyl alcohol to benzaldehyde using water as solvent.