Eco-Friendly Synthesis of Nitrogen-Doped Mesoporous Carbon for Supercapacitor Application

Georges Moussa,Pierre-Louis Taberna,Patrice Simon,Camélia Matei Ghimbeu,Samar Hajjar-Garreau

doi:10.3390/c4020020

Abstract

A sustainable and simple synthesis procedure involving the co-assembly of green phenolic resin and amphiphilic polymer template in water/ethanol mixture at room temperature to synthesize nitrogen doped mesoporous carbon is reported herein. Guanine is proposed as a novel nitrogen-based precursor which is able to create H-bondings both with the phenolic resin and the template allowing the formation of mesoporous carbons with nitrogen atoms uniformly distributed in their framework. The influence of the synthesis procedure, template amount and annealing temperature on the carbon textural properties, structure and surface chemistry were investigated. For several conditions, carbon materials with ordered pore size and high nitrogen content (up to 10.6 at %) could be achieved. The phase separation procedure combined with optimal amount of template favor the formation of ordered mesoporous carbons with higher specific surface area while the increase in the temperature induces a decrease in the surface area and amount of heteroatoms (N and O). The electrochemical performances as electrode in supercapacitors were evaluated in acidic medium and the capacitance was closely related to the material conductivity and surface chemistry.

Highlights

Ordered mesoporous carbons (OMC) received tremendous attention during the last decade mainly due to their tunable and uniform pore size/geometry, pore connectivity and adjustable surface functionalities
Inspired by our recent works, we report a direct synthesis of N-doped ordered mesoporous carbons with a high nitrogen content and tuned porosity by co-assembly of phloroglucinol–glyoxylic acid resin and guanine with Pluronic F-127 template in water/ethanol mixture at room temperature
The synthesis of N-doped carbons was performed via the soft-template approach involving the organic-organic self-assembly of phenolic resins molecules with a soft-template, which is able to create the mesoporosity and to organize it in different shapes and size depending of several factors (Figure 1)

Summary

Introduction

Ordered mesoporous carbons (OMC) received tremendous attention during the last decade mainly due to their tunable and uniform pore size/geometry, pore connectivity and adjustable surface functionalities. All these properties made them valuable materials in many fields of applications such as the catalysis, gas adsorption and separation, energy storage, drug delivery, and gas sensors [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The soft template has been chosen taking into consideration the advantages such as simplicity, time efficiency and convenient removal of the template by simple thermal annealing This approach consists in supramolecular self-assembly organization of organic species. Cross-linked phenolic resins are used as carbon-yielding components, which are able to co-assembly with an amphiphilic block co-polymer acting as a pore-forming component

Methods

Results

Conclusion