Electrochemical and oxygen desorption properties of nanostructured ternary compound NaxMnO2 directly templated from mesoporous SBA-15

A facile one-pot synthesis route has been developed to prepare the structure-controllable ternary compound NaxMnO2 by a replication approach using mesoporous silica SBA-15 as template. The material structures were thoroughly investigated by XRD, N2 sorption, FESEM, TEM, and XPS techniques. The well-defined NaxMnO2 nanorods was prepared by the complete manganese source filling into the pore channels of mesoporous silica when the surfactant P123 was extracted with excess ethanol, while layered NaxMnO2 nanosheets are obtained by the partial filling of the Mn source into the pore channels where ethanol was not used to extract the surfactant. The NaxMnO2 nanosheets can be prepared with a porous structure by controlling the template removing process. Such a layered NaxMnO2 nanosheet material has large surface area, more included-oxygen and high reversible specific capacitance (261 F/g), and can be potentially used as high performance electrochemical materials in capacitors and oxygen storage/sensor materials.