Synthesis of bimodal mesoporous carbon nanospheres for methyl orange adsorption

Mesoporous materials with bimodal mesopores show advantages in adsorption, energy storage, and catalysis because such unique structures are beneficial to the mass transfer. Here, we describe the synthesis of bimodal mesoporous carbon nanospheres (BMCSs) by using phenolic resin as carbon precursor, triblock copolymer Pluronic F127 as the soft template, and mesoporous silica spheres as hard templates. The BMCSs with uniform spherical morphology, high specific surface area (1489 m 2  g − 1 ), large pore volume (0.92 cm 3  g − 1 ), and bimodal mesoporous structure (3.8 and 6.8 nm) exhibit promising properties for adsorption of methyl orange (MO). The maximum adsorption capacity of the BMCSs is 5.5 × 10 2  ± 0.2 × 10 2  mg g − 1 , which is higher than that of many adsorbents reported. The kinetics studies show a better fit of pseudo-second-order model. Meanwhile, fitting equilibrium data show that the Langmuir model is more suitable to describe the MO adsorption than Freundlich model.