Recently, the discovery of ordered mesoporous silica materials such
as MCM-41 and SBA-15 is of considerable interest because of their regular
pore array with uniform pore diameter, high surface area and pore
volume [11,12]. Much work has been focused on the preparation of such
novel mesoporous materials for the benzylation reaction [13–26]. For
example, active species were directly introduced into the framework
of mesoporous silica materials during their synthesis or were supported
in their channels. And these mesoporous catalysts exhibited a better
catalytic performance than microporous zeolites in the benzylation
reactions. However, it is well known that mesoporous silica materials
possessed poor stability and weak acidity compared with zeolites.
Therefore, mesoporous materials with high stability and strong acidity
have been sought