Exfoliated MOF-derived N-doped honeycomb cavernous carbon with enhanced electrocatalytic activity as electrochemical platform

Abstract

In this paper, an exfoliated N-doped honeycomb cavernous carbon (ENC-800) with enhanced properties has been successfully synthesized by exfoliating carbonized metal-organic frameworks with high nitrogen content (N-MOFs) at liquid phase. Due to the high nitrogen content inheriting from the rich-imidazolyl organic ligand, ENC-800 shows excellent electrocatalytical activity and good performance as electrochemical detection platform. The substantial existence of graphitic N in ENC-800 provides generous C-N active site and high conductivity for catalyzing reaction. In addition, the increased specific surface area caused by exfoliation and evaporation of organic solvents confined in the N-MOFs also contributes to the electrochemical performance of ENC-800. In order to explore the potentiality of this material in electrochemical field, chloramphenicol (CAP) was detected by ENC-800 modified electrode and satisfactory results were obtained. In optimized conditions, the linear response of the ENC-800/GCE for CAP was obtained from 0.05 μM to 0.10 mM and from 0.10 mM to 3 mM with detection limit of 0.04 μM. Meanwhile, the new method to obtain an enhanced specific surface area by carbonizing solvent-contained MOFs provides a novel direction for post-processing of MOFs.