A novel route for preparing mesoporous carbon aerogels using inorganic templates under ambient drying

•An approach to synthesize carbon aerogels by using templates and drying at ambient pressure.•Carbon aerogels possess high mesopore ratio and large pore volume.•A low-cost and scalable method to produce mesoporous carbon aerogels with large pore volumes.

A low-cost approach for mesoporous carbon aerogel synthesis using calcium carbonate particles as templates and ambient pressure drying is reported in this paper. The removal of templates by acid treatment produced additional mesopores that mimic the template particles. The resulting carbon aerogels showed higher mesopore ratio and a significantly larger pore volume compared with those without templates. This study provides a low-cost and easy-to-scale-up method for producing mesoporous carbon aerogels with large pore volumes.