Morphological Control of Porous SiC Templated by As-Synthesized Form of Mesoporous Silica

Abstract

Porous silicon carbide with fiber like morphology was successfully prepared via a hard templating approach using as-synthesized form of mesoporous silica SBA-15 as template and sucrose as carbon precursor. The obtained materials have been characterized by various sophisticated techniques such as XRD, nitrogen adsorption, HRTEM, HRSEM, FT-IR and TGA. The XRD and the nitrogen adsorption results revealed that the materials are highly crystalline and exhibit porous structure with excellent textural characteristics. It has been demonstrated that the morphology of the materials can be finely controlled from rod shaped morphology to fiber like nanostructures by the simple adjustment of the reaction time from 5 to 12 h at the reaction temperature of 1300 degrees C. The reaction time of 12 h at 1300 degrees C was found to be the best condition to obtain highly crystalline nanofiber like morphology. The obtained materials display beautiful nanofiber morphology which has the diameter of 20 to 60 nm and a length of 7 to 10 microm which is much longer than the previously reported SiC nanofibers.