Research progress on prepartion of MOF-derived porous carbon materials through pyrolysis

Abstract

Nano-porous carbon (NPCs) materials exhibit great application potential in industry because of its abundant pore structures, large specific surface area and easy to design. The key points of the research usually focus on the achievement of better performance and lower preparation cost through adjusting its composition and structure. Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) as a new kind of porous crystal material, have the outstanding features of adjustable composition, multiple structure, adjustable controllable pore size, which has received the widespread attention in catalysis, energy storage and conversion, gas storage, environmental restoration, and so on. In particular, based on the structure and composition of MOFs, it can be used for the preparation of various forms of porous carbon materials or a novel multifunctional carbon composite material as the common precursor. Compared with the composite material assembled with single component, the MOFs derived porous carbon materials often shows superior features. In this paper, the design principles and strategies for the preparation of porous carbon materials through MOFs pyrolysis are reviewed in this paper and the future development prospects and challenges are presented for obtain high performance porous carbon and its composite materials. MOFs derived porous carbon can be obtain via a pyrolysis process, which inherit the structure features of MOF precursor to a large extent. Researchers can design the MOFs derived porous carbon from the particle and pore size, heteroatom doping, metal species anchoring, microtopography and composite structure, etc., for expanding the application scope and improving performance. For the morphology, not only the zero dimensional quantum dot, two dimensional nanosheet and three dimensional framework can be prepared, but also NPCs can grow on different substrate surface to form a composite structure. Moreover, block or cloth integral NPCs materials also be reported to enrich the application form. For the composition, heteroatom doping such as N, S, P is proved to be effective approach to enhance the NPCs electro-catalytic property and the addition of secondary carbon source containing these atoms is a facile method to prepare such materials. More importantly, the metal species are evenly distributed in the MOFs as crosslinking sites, so the metal-loading NPCs can be easily obtained by direct carbonation, and the form of metal nanoparticle can be adjusted by controlling the precursor composition, pyrolysis conditions and post treatment. Especially, it is an inspiring and effective method to prepare uniform and high-loading single atom-immobilized NPCs based on MOFs structure. In order to promote the industrial application process of MOFs derived porous carbon materials, adopting cheaper ligands and developing simple synthesis and control methods are still the direction of efforts. Furthermore, it should strengthen the research of the inner relationship between special morphology, composition and application performance, and pay more attention to understand the action mechanism for the characteristics and formation of activity sites in the MOFs derived NPCs affecting its related application performance. Only by combining theoretical research and experimental analysis to guide the design of MOFs derived porous carbon materials in the future can we fabricate applicable NPCs material with both merits of low cost and excellent performance.