Bimodal mesoporous carbon synthesized from large organic precursor and amphiphilic tri-block copolymer by self-assembly

Owing to several disadvantages of traditional hard template based synthesis, soft-template or self-assembly was adopted to synthesize mesoporous carbon. In this work, we have introduced hexaphenol as a new and large organic precursor for the synthesis of mesoporous carbon by self-assembly with Pluronic P123 as structure dictating agent. The resultant mesoporous carbon is bimodal in nature with median pore widths of 29 and 45 Å and BET surface area of 312 m2/g. Unlike previously synthesized mesoporous carbon, this carbon possesses negligible micropore volume. This mesoporous carbon is very suitable candidate for several applications including membrane separation, chemical sensor or selective sorption of larger molecules.