Facile preparation of monodisperse micrometer-sized hollow silica spheres with tunable size and commendable surface topography

The fabrication of hollow silica spheres (HSS) is of great importance due to its plenty of implications. Till now, several methods to prepare HSS have been reported, which existed some drawbacks. Herein, a facile and efficient approach was developed to successfully fabricate micrometer-sized monodisperse HSS based on templating method. The approach was achieved by changing the initial water volume and using ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EGDMA) as the crosslinking agent. The alteration of water volume was the key factor in controlling the size of HSS, and EGDMA was used to accessorily enlarge the bulk of template spheres. In this way, the uniform HSS were controlled in micrometer scale, which simultaneously possessed the favorable surface topography. This method could achieve high reproducibility and would become a general method to systematically manipulate the size and shape of inorganic spheres as we expected. Most importantly, the formation mechanism for HSS was presented and some key influencing factors were analyzed.