Controlled synthesis of tunable nanoporous carbons for gas storage and supercapacitor application

•IRMOF-3 templated porous carbons with tunable surface area were synthesized.•Sucrose of different loading has been used as an external carbon precursor.•High surface area NPC-300 carbon sample shows good CO2 and H2 storage property.•NPC-300 sample studied for electrochemical double layered capacitor.

A simple methodology has been developed for the synthesis of functional nanoporous carbon (NPC) materials using a metal–organic framework (IRMOF-3) that can act as a template for external carbon precursor (viz. sucrose) and also a self-sacrificing carbon source. The resultant graphitic NPC samples (abbreviated as NPC-0, NPC-150, NPC-300, NPC-500 and NPC-1000 based on sucrose loading) obtained through loading different amounts of sucrose exhibit tunable textural parameters. Among these, NPC-300 shows very high surface area (BET ≈ 3119 m2/g, Langmuir ≈ 4031 m2/g) with a large pore volume of 1.93 cm3/g. High degree of porosity coupled with polar surface functional groups, make NPC-300 remarkable candidate for the uptake of H2 (2.54 wt% at 1 bar, and 5.1 wt% at 50 bar, 77 K) and CO2 (64 wt% at 1 bar, 195 K and 16.9 wt% at 30 bar, 298 K). As a working electrode in a supercapacitor cell, NPC-300 shows excellent reversible charge storage thus, demonstrating multifunctional usage of the carbon materials.

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