Preparation of Silica Gel from Quartz for Direct Synthesis of Alkoxysilanes
摘要
Alkoxysilanes are widely used all over the world. However, its production process is always accompanied by high energy consumption and high pollution, the most important reason is the process of carbon thermal reduction of SiO2 or [SiO4]4− to prepare metallic Si. In this work, a method was proposed to convert crystalline quartz into amorphous silica gel, which can avoid the traditional step and directly synthesize alkoxysilanes from quartz. NH4F was used for the purpose of gelation and recycled through a reversible reaction, the solution and reagent in the reaction process had basically no chemical loss after 10 cycles. Simultaneously quartz was transitioned to silica gel with the destruction of the lattice structure. During the gelation transition, the alcohol-water ratio of the system was adjusted to 40% in order to optimize the particle size and BET of silica gel. Smaller particle sizes and larger BET SiO2 will allow the direct chemical reaction of silica and alcohol to form TROS (R = ethoxy or n-butoxy) at 200 ℃ for 3 h.