Facile synthesis of monolithic hierarchical porous carbon materials via molten salt method

Abstract

Hierarchical porous carbon materials (HPCMs) have attracted promising potential in the fields of catalyst supports, adsorbents, and electrochemical electrodes. However, traditional templating methods suffer from complicated synthesis processes as well as the difficulty of removing templates. In this work, HPCMs were successfully synthesized by direct polymerization of resorcinol and furfural in the presence of zinc chloride. Zinc chloride is served as dehydration and porogen, which plays a key role in the formation of HPCMs and could be removed easily with deionized water, thus inorganic template and hazardous chemicals could be avoided. Carbonization temperature and the molar ratio of raw materials have significant effect on the textural properties of HPCMs. When the molar ratios of isopropanol/resorcinol and zinc chloride/resorcinol were chosen as 6.0 and 4.0, respectively, in the carbonization temperature of 900 °C, HPCMs containing interconnected micro-, meso-, and macropores are obtained, whose density is down to 0.16 g/cm3 and specific surface area is up to 935.9 m2/g.