Cheng Chen

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that cationic surfactant plays critical roles in forming the hollow mesoporous structure and can be extended as a general strategy to transform silica-coated composite materials into yolk-shell structures with either wormhole-like or oriented mesoporus shell.

TL;DR: It is reported that hollow/yolk-shell structures with catalytically active ordered mesoporous aluminosilica shells can be easily prepared by using silica spheres as the silica precursors, and the synthesis strategy developed in this work can be extended as a general strategy to prepare ordered Mesoporous yolk- shell structures with diverse compositions and morphologies simply by replacing solid silica sphere with silica-coated nanocomposites.

TL;DR: This feature article provides an overview of advances in the self-templating synthesis of hollow mesoporous silica based on the following three strategies: surface-protected etching, structural difference-based selective etch, and cationic surfactant assisted self-Templating.

TL;DR: An in situ generated catalyst from readily available RuH(2)(PPh(3))(4), an N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) precursor, NaH, and acetonitrile was developed and showed high activity for the amide synthesis directly from either alcohols or aldehydes with amines.

TL;DR: In this paper, N-heterocyclic carbene based ruthenium complexes were developed as highly active catalysts for direct amide synthesis from alcohols and amines.