Synthesis of carbon foams for capturing VOCs

Mesoscopically ordered porous carbon materials recently have attracted widespread attention. The porous carbon materials have the following advantages: adjusted pore size, better thermal stability, hydrolysis resistance, relatively high specific surface area, regular particle shape and high porosity so that it has broad application prospects in heterogeneous catalysis, separation, super capacitor electrode materials, bio -materials and other fields. In this paper, we use silica nanospheres self-assembled into a three-dimensional ordered structure as a hard template and fill the carbonaceous precursors in the voids of silica nanospheres. Then after high-temperature carbonization and removal of silica, the preparation of the porous carbon material is finally achieved. For the preparation of silica nanospheres, there has been the Stöber method. Although a wider range of research methods have been reported on the basis of the Stöber method, the control of the particle size of monodisperse silica nanospheres has attracted widespread attention. This paper uses a new synthetic method：seed regrowth method. The seed regrowth method is that suppress the formation of new particles through adding the silica precursor (e.g.,TEOS) to grow the pre-formed silica nanospheres as seeds. By varying the amount of TEOS added to the seed dispersion and the size of the seeds itself, the size of the final silica nanospheres is altered and finally monodisperse silica nanospheres can be obtained. The silica nanospheres is impregnated and furfurly alcohol (C5H6O2) is effectively filled into the voids of the three-dimensional structure of the silica particles to realize the preparation of the high-performance porous carbon material. The adsorption properties of VOCs for porous carbon materials are also mentioned