Mesoporous carbon fabricated with an alumina template

Abstract

There has been much interest in porous carbon materials fabricated from both silica and zeolite templates. Typical procedures involve the synthesis of a silica template, impregnation of the template with a carbon precursor, polymerisation of the carbon and then removal of the template using hydrofluoric acid. Both the synthesis and removal of the silica template can be time consuming and expensive. Porous alumina can offer a cheaper and more facile template removal process using NaOH instead of hydrofluoric acid. The alumina template may also allow different pore structure than that of silica or zeolite template. Here we present initial results for mesoporous carbon templated from alumina. The carbon material had a dominant pore diameter of approximately 3.5 nm