Fabrication of Mesoporous Carbons with Rod and Winding Road Like Morphology Using NbSBA-15 Templates

Here we demonstrate for the first time the fabrication hexagonally ordered mesoporous carbon materials with different morphology and pore diameters using NbSBA-15 mesoporous silica template with different niobium content. The materials were characterized by several characterization techniques such as XRD, HRSEM, HRTEM, elemental mapping, ICP-AES, and EDS analysis. We also demonstrate that the morphology of the materials can be controlled by simply tuning the morphology of the parent NbSBA-15 template, whose morphology can be tuned by adjusting the loading of niobium in the framework wall structure of SBA-15. Nitrogen adsorption results reveal that the textural parameters of the mesoporous carbon materials prepared from NbSBA-15 are much better than those prepared with pristine SBA-15 template, and vary with the amount niobium present in the template. It was also found that the pore diameter of the NbMC-X increases with decreasing the amount of niobium in the framework wall structure of the template. The morphology and the topology of the materials were observed by HRSEM and HRTEM, respectively. The materials with rod and semi-spherical or winding road like morphology can be obtained using NbSBA-15 materials with different Nb content. It was found that the usage of NbSBA-15 as templates for the fabrication of mesoporous carbon materials can also allow us to decorate the pore channels of the materials with either niobium oxide or niobium silicate nanoparticles which are expected to show high performance when used in redox catalysis, and the biomolecule adsorption as the niobium has the strong tendency to adsorb the protein molecules.