Microwave-assisted hydrothermal synthesis of carbon monolith via a soft-template method using resorcinol and formaldehyde as carbon precursor and pluronic F127 as template

•Carbon monolith was synthesized via a microwave-assisted hydrothermal process.•The synthesized material is crack-free, with a high BET surface area of 697 m2/g.•The synthesized material is mesoporous with a narrow pore size distribution of 6.4 nm.•This microwave-assisted approach is faster than the conventional oven method.

A new microwave-assisted hydrothermal synthesis of carbon monolith is reported in this work. The process uses microwave heating at 100 °C under acidic condition by employing a triblock copolymer F127 as the template, and resorcinol–formaldehyde as the carbon precursor. Scanning electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, nitrogen sorption measurements, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray studies and thermogravimetic analysis were used to characterize the synthesized material. The carbon monolith is crack-free, mesoporous and has a high surface area of 697 m2/g. The results demonstrate that the microwave-assisted hydrothermal synthesis is a fast and simple approach to obtain carbon monoliths, as it reduces effectively the synthesis time from hours to a few minutes which could be an advantage in the large scale production of the material.