Accessibility to gases of dye molecules in hybrid surfactant-silica mesophases

Two types of CTABr-silica mesophases have been prepared, one of them a powder with hexagonal structure containing Congo Red, another one a film with cubic structure containing Disperse Red 1. In the former case the dye has been occluded via co-entrapping, whereas in the latter it has been covalently anchored to the silica matrix via a co-condensation route. In both systems, the dye molecules proved to be accessible to NH3, HCl and (CH3)(3)N in the gas phase, notwithstanding the presence of micelles in the mesophase, which results to be fully permeable to such molecules.