Facile and controllable synthesis of ordered mesoporous carbons with tunable single-crystal morphology for CO2 capture

A facile strategy for efficient synthesis of ordered mesoporous carbons (OMCs) with regular single-crystal morphology was designed, and based on this detailed effect of early dissolving temperature, hydrothermal temperature and time, and carbonization temperature on textural properties and structures of obtained single-crystal OMCs were further systematically investigated. Compared with other methods, this strategy was a simple single-step process without complicated pre-polymerization procedure, and didn’t require extremely long reaction time for the formation of single-crystal morphology. What’s more important, single-crystal morphology of OMCs, such as spherical, rhombic dodecahedral, hexagonal prismatic and cubic morphology, can be easily generated and tuned by just simply controlling the dissolving temperature, indicating an important and decisive role of dissolving temperature in determining the morphology types. In addition to the well-developed single-crystal morphology, the obtained OMCs also exhibited high surface areas, uniform pore sizes, and appreciable nitrogen contents, which make them exhibit considerable CO 2 capacities, high CO 2 /N 2 selectivity, excellent cycling stability, and a much higher specific capacity of CO 2 than some nanostructured N-doped carbons with high nitrogen content. Besides, a possible growth mechanism was also proposed based on the direct observations from the SEM images of some synthesized single-crystal OMCs.