A Glucose-Assisted Hydrothermal Reaction for Directly Transforming Metal–Organic Frameworks into Hollow Carbonaceous Materials

Hollow micro-/nanostructures with controllable shape, size, and composition are an intriguing class of porous materials with a promising potential for various applications. Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) have been attractive as promising precursors for preparing carbon materials with various kinds of nanoartchitectures owing to the rich variety in their composition, morphology, and structure. Herein, we report a glucose-assisted hydrothermal method for directly transforming MOFs into hollow carbonaceous materials. During the hydrothermal reaction, the MOF particles (zeolitic imidazolate frameworks-8, ZIF-8) are decomposed, which is induced by the acid generated from the hydrolysis of glucose. At the same time, the species released from the decomposed MOF continuously diffuse out and react with the glucose-derived polymers, resulting in the formation of hollow Zn-containing carbonaceous composites. Following calcination at 900 °C and 500 °C under a nitrogen atmosphere, hollow carbon and zinc oxide/carbon (ZnO/C) materials can be obtained, respectively. The obtained ZnO/C materials with hollow interiors exhibit more active sites, which are supported by their superior electrochemical performance for supercapacitor applications. The proposed method in this work provides a pathway for synthesizing a variety of multicompositional inorganic hollow structures from MOFs, which would facilitate their potential use in practical applications