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Progress of superhydrophilic porous carbon materials
Date: 2017-10-13     View: 2644

Porous carbon materials own surface area, adjustable porous structure, stable phys-chemical properties. They can be used in wide applications including absorption/separation of gas or liquid, catalysis or electricity capacitor. However, traditional strategies to fabricate the porous carbon materials used the silicon materials as templates, which suffered the sacrifice of template and difficulty to adjust porous structures.

Recently, researchers in Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE), Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Korea Institute of Materials Science, successfully developed a new facile dual-templating method to fabricate the porous carbon materials with macro-meso hierarchial pores structure, which enabled the materials more excellent hydrophilicity and controllable conductivity. During the synthesis, the PET fabric was used as hard template and the block polymer F127 acted as soft template, phenolic resol served as carbon source. After carbonization, decomposition of PET fabric fibers led to the formation of macro pores, while the decomposition of block polymers formed meso pores. Carbonized phenolic resol was hydrophilic. In this case, macro pores provided passway for water spreading, meso pores increased water-solid contact area, and thus enhanced the spreading of water in the material. More importantly, the conductivity of this porous carbon material could be well adjusted by carbonization conditions. For example, the material resistivity was 5.43×103 Ωm in case of carbonized process under 600 °C for 1 min, but it decreased to 3.50×10-3 Ωm at carbonization of 900 °C for 60 min. Since the large surface area of porous structure improved the contact condition between conductive particles in the solution and the material, this material has shown the high sensitivity in methanol concentration detection. When the methanol concentration increased from 2 mol/L to 5 mol/L, the resisitivity of the solution increased from 5.04 Ωm to 1.27×102 Ωm, which was much higher than the published references. Therefore, the current results bring forward a new idea to design and fabricate the porous carbon materials with high sensitive detection in liquid environment.

 

Fig. 1. Schematic of synthesis of porous materials using dual-template and morphology porous carbon material

 

Fig. 2 Wettability changes of different liquids on various samples in ambient condition

 

Fig. 3 The scheme for liquid concentration detection and resistivity changes of different porous materials in methanol solutions with different concentration

   This research work has been published in Advanced Engineering Materials, 00(2017)1700608(DOI: 10.1002/adem.201700608) and also be online highlighted by Advanced Science News at http://www.advancedsciencenews.com/hierarchically-porous-carbon-fabric-highly-sensitive-electrochemical-sensors/. The First author is Dr. Yuan Jiao, Prof. Aiying Wang from Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE), Chinese Academy of Sciences and Dr. Myong-Woon Moon from Korea Institute of Science and Technology are the co-corresponding authors. This work has been supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51522106), and a project from China Scholarship Council (No. 201504910643).

(Written by:  Yuan Jiao)

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