Investigation on the Textural Properties Tuning of Ordered Mesoporous Carbons with an Excellent Electrochemical Performance

Pavuluri Srinivasu

doi:10.1155/2011/615164

Abstract

A synthetic method to produce mesoporous carbons with tunable textural properties and ordered pore structure has been developed by changing sucrose to water ratio. The specific surface area of 1437 m2/g with pore volume of 1.4 cm3/g and porosity of mesopores centered at around 4.4 nm are achieved by tuning the concentration of filling amount into mesoporous silica. The mesoporous carbon exhibits hexagonal rod-like morphology (a diameter of ~1.2 m), which confirms that the replication process is highly successful. It is demonstrated that the prepared mesoporous carbon exhibits much higher current density and superior performance as compared to conventional activated charcoal.

Highlights

Ordered mesoporous carbons have attracted considerable attention in the past few years due to their applications in adsorption of larger molecules, electrochemical double layer capacitor, catalyst support, fuel cells, solar cells, and hydrogen storage systems [1,2,3,4,5,6]
In order to obtain fully polymerized and carbonized sucrose inside the pores of silica template, 0.47 g of sucrose, 0.05 g of H2SO4, and 5.0 g of water were again added to the pretreated sample and the mixture was again subjected to thermal treatment described above
The XRD patterns are exactly matched with the patterns of SBA-15 silica template, which indicates that the mesoporous carbons are inverse replicas of those templates

Summary

Introduction

Ordered mesoporous carbons have attracted considerable attention in the past few years due to their applications in adsorption of larger molecules, electrochemical double layer capacitor, catalyst support, fuel cells, solar cells, and hydrogen storage systems [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Several different methods have been developed to synthesize mesoporous carbons These include the carbonization of polymer aerogels such as resorcinol-formaldehyde resins [9], the catalytic activation of carbon precursors in the presence of metals and organometallic compounds [10, 11], and carbonization of polymer blends with thermally unstable components [12, 13]. These methods result in having a mesoporous carbon with broad pore size distribution. The electrocatalytic activity of prepared carbon material is investigated

Experimental

Results and Discussion

Conclusions