Catalytic hydroxylation enables phenol to efficient assembly of ordered mesoporous carbon under highly acidic conditions

• Mesoporous carbons were synthesized from phenol with the aid of catalytic hydroxylation.
• The obtained mesoporous carbon possesses pseudocapacitive oxygen group.
• The final mesoporous carbon presents superior supercapacitive performances.

As an important route towards the preparation of ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC), the aqueous assembly method with phenol as precursor still faces a challenge of yielding an OMC under acidic conditions because of the formation of thermoplastic resin in acidic conditions, which leads to structure collapse during carbonization. Herein, we developed an approach combined catalytic hydroxylation of phenol with assembly process to prepare OMC under acidic conditions. In our route, phenol was first partially converted into highly reactive phenols (catechol and hydroquinone) by catalytic hydroxylation, and the resulted mixture of phenols then interacted with template of Pluronic block copolymer F127 under acidic conditions to form a thermosetting mesophase through phase separation, which was carbonized to form OMC. The obtained carbon possesses ordered mesostructure with surface area of 435 m2/g, pore volume of 0.41 cm3/g and achieves high capacitance of 231 F/g for supercapacitor compared to that of normal mesoporous carbon (151 F/g) and activated carbon (AC, 119 F/g), which may be attributed to its high oxygen content resulted from catalytic hydroxylation. The developed strategy not only affords a novel approach for the synthesis of OMC but also provides a way to introduce pseudocapacitive oxygen on ordered mesoporous carbon.

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