Journal of Molecular Catalysis A: Chemical 330 (2010) 49–55 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Molecular Catalysis A: Chemical journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/molcata New mesoporous silicotitaniumphosphate and its application in acid catalysis and adsorption of As(III/V), Cd(II) and Hg(II) Manidipa Paul a , Nabanita Pal a , M. Ali b , Asim Bhaumik a,∗ a Department of Materials Science, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, 2A & B Raja S. C. Mullick Road, Jadavpur, Kolkata , West Bengal 700 032, India b Chemistry Department, Jadavpur University, Jadavpur, Kolkata, West Bengal 700 032, India article info Article history: Received 24 December 2009 Received in revised form 2 April 2010 Accepted 1 July 2010 Available online 7 July 2010 Keywords: Adsorption Benzylation reaction Heteroelement incorporation Mesoporous materials Titanium phosphate abstract A new mesoporous silicotitaniumphosphate material has been synthesized by using a non-conventional phosphorous source trimethyl phosphite with the aid of Pluronic F127 as structure directing agent (SDA). The mesopores are generated due to the slow hydrolysis of the reactant materials in the presence of supramolecular-assembly of non-ionic surfactant under the evaporation induced self-assembly (EISA) process. The material has been characterized by powder XRD, N 2 sorption, TEM, SEM–EDS, TG–DTA, FT-IR, XPS, 29 Si, 31 P MAS NMR and UV–vis spectroscopic techniques. This new mesoporous material has considerably high BET surface area (379 m 2 g -1 ) and narrow pore size distribution with a peak pore width of 5.4 nm. The material showed good catalytic activity in the liquid phase Friedel–Crafts benzylation reaction suggesting strong acidity on its surface. It can also be used as good adsorbent for the removal of toxic metal ions As(III/V), Cd(II) and Hg(II) from the contaminated water. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Since the discovery of mesoporous silica molecular sieves using the supramolecular-assembly of surfactants as SDA [1,2], the door for a new area of research is opened to the researchers. The very high surface area, tunable pore size, easy functional- ization and large diversity of frameworks have made this class of material an efficient catalyst, adsorbent and an excellent host for the nanomaterial synthesis. In the last few years attentions have also been focused to explore different types of mesoporous materials other than silica framework like metal oxides, phos- phates, carbon, etc. Functionalized mesoporous materials have received much interest in this context due to their wide applica- tion in various catalytic reactions [3–5]. Recently several porous metallophosphates [6–9] have been reported, which could find important applications as catalyst in selective organic reactions [8], exchanger [9] and photocatalysis [10]. Mesoporous mate- rials containing different hetero-elements find various practical applications due to the specific physical and chemical nature of the doped element in the framework. Although the mesoporous titanium phosphates synthesized using cationic and anionic sur- factants as SDA have been exploited as catalysts for liquid phase oxidation and photocatalytic reactions, their potentiality in acid catalyzed reactions have not been studied so far. Moreover the ∗ Corresponding author. Fax: +91 33 2473 2805. E-mail addresses: msab@iacs.res.in, msab@mahendra.iacs.res.in (A. Bhaumik). stability of these phosphate-based mesoporous materials is rela- tively poor due to the highly charged framework structure. On the other hand, multi-component mesoporous phosphate-based mate- rials [11] have better stability and high surface area. But to date, their catalytic properties in liquid phase reactions have not been explored so far. This problem can be overcome by introducing Si in the meso- porous titanium phosphate framework similar to the incorporation of Si in the aluminophosphate [12,13] or tin(IV) phosphate mate- rials [14]. Herein, we report the synthesis of novel mesoporous silicotitaniumphosphate material having very high surface area and thermal stability. The material also exhibits a good catalytic activ- ity in benzylation reaction. To the best of our knowledge there is no report of mesoporous silicotitaniumphosphate material in the literature. Furthermore in this synthetic procedure we have cho- sen Pluronic F127 as template, which generally plays a crucial role for the formation of silica [15] and metal oxide [16] mesophases using evaporation induced self-assembly (EISA) method. The main advantage of this procedure is that here we can adjust the molar ratio of the constituents in the precursor gel, as the ratio remain almost same in gel and final calcined product. This novel material showed good adsorption property and catalytic activity in liquid phase benzylation reaction. 2. Experimental Mesoporous silicotitaniumphosphate has been synthesized using titanium (IV) butoxide (Ti(BuO) 4 , Aldrich) as the source of 1381-1169/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.molcata.2010.07.001