Nanoporous Colloidal Carbon Spheres for Energy Applications

Jian Liu1

1Department of Chemical Engineering, Curtin University, Perth, WA 6845, Australia

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Carbon spheres, integrating the advantages of carbon materials and spherical colloids, exhibit several unique features such as regular geometry, good liquidity, tunable porosity and controllable particle size distribution as compared to powders or flakes, and therefore these innovative materials present a great utilitarian value for catalysis, adsorption, water and air purification, energy storage and conversion.1-5 In this presentation, I will discuss our recent progress toward advanced colloidal carbon spheres for energy applications.

We have developed carbon nanostructured electrode materials, including novel microporous carbon spheres, mesoporous carbon spheres, core shell and yolk shell carbon spheres with hierarchical porous structures. Specifically, (i) we recently developed a strategy to synthesise monodisperse polymer spheres from resorcinol–formaldehyde (RF) resin and carbon “Stöber” spheres.2 This is essentially an improvement and extension of the Stöber route involving emulsion polymerisation, which is facile and efficient in producing monodisperse resin spheres. This method allows for excellent control of the particle size ranging from 200 to 1000 nm. Monodisperse carbon spheres can be produced with high yield and tunable size between 150 and 900 nm by carbonisation. (ii) In addition, modified carbon spheres have been prepared through a bottom up self-assembly by using different functional precursors, or post-synthesis modification method.3 Furthermore, we have applied this method to produce uniform carbon core–shell spheres with adjustable shell thickness, carbon@metal, carbon@silica, metal@carbon, silica@carbon, or metal oxide@carbon materials.4 (iii) We also extended the synthesis method of mesoporous silica nanospheres to enable the preparation of ordered mesoporous resorcinol formaldehyde nanospheres with particle size from 80 to 400 nm and mesopores of ~3.5 nm in diameter.5 By finely tuning the synthesis parameters, multi-layered mesoporous resorcinol formaldehyde hollow nanospheres can be successfully synthesised. Mesoporous carbon nanospheres and hollow nanospheres with high surface area are further obtained through carbonisation of the polymer spheres. The resulted mesoporous carbon nanospheres have been used as the host cathode material for lithium-sulfur batteries.

Our synthesis strategies provide a new benchmark for fabricating well-defined porous carbonaceous nanospheres with a great promise for energy storage and conversion applications.

References

[1]A. Nieto-Marquez, R. Romero, A. Romero, and J. L. Valverde, J. Mater. Chem. 21, 1664-1672 (2011).

[2]J. Liu, S. Z. Qiao, H. Liu, J. Chen, A. Orpe, D. Y. Zhao and G. Q. M. Lu,Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 50, 5947-5951 (2011).

[3]N. Li, Q. Zhang, J. Liu, J. Joo, A. Lee, Y. Gan and Y. Yin, Chem. Commun. 49, 5135-5137 (2013).

[4]T. Yang, J. Liu, Y. Zheng, M. J. Monteiro, and S. Z. Qiao, Chem. Eur. J.19, 6942-6945 (2013).

[5]J. Liu, T. Yang, D.-W. Wang, G. Q. M. Lu, D. Y. Zhao and S. Z. Qiao, Nature Commun. 4,2798; doi: 10.1038/ncomms3798 (2013).