Comprehensive Understanding on Synthesis and Formation Mechanism of Dendritic Mesoporous Silica Nanospheres

The interest in the design and controlled fabrication of dendritic mesoporous silica nanospheres (DMSNs) emanates from their widespread applications in drug-delivery carriers, catalysis and nanodevices owing to their unique open three-dimensional dendritic superstructures with large pore channels and highly accessible internal surface areas. A variety of synthesis strategies have been reported, but there is no basic consensus on the elucidation of pore structure and the underlying formation mechanism of DMSNs. Although all the DMSNs show a certain degree of similarity in structure, do they follow the same synthesis mechanism? What are the exact pore structures of DMSNs? How did the bimodal pore size distributions kinetically evolve in the self-assembly? Can the relative fractions of small mesopores and dendritic large pores be precisely adjusted? In this review, by carefully analysing their structures and deeply understanding their formation mechanism of each reported DMSNs, and coupling with our research results on this topic, we conclude that indeed all the DMSNs have the same mesostructures and follows the same dynamically self-assembly mechanism using microemulsion droplets as super templates in the early reaction stage, even without the oil phase.