Synthesis Routes of POSS

The study of the chemistry of materials containing Si–O bonds was in the past mainly applied to both inorganic silica and minerals or to organic silicones field in which the R2SiO unit dominates. However, in the last decade, the field of silsesquioxane chemistry with general composition RSiO3/2 has grown dramatically and many structures have been proposed in the literature. The idea of this chapter is to make an overview of the main synthetic approaches used to prepare completely and partially polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes (POSS), highlighting the advantages and the weakness of each procedure. A brief description of the characterization techniques used to analyze the physicochemical properties of POSS was also carried out.