A General Synthetic Approach for Ordered Mesoporous Metal Sulfides

Mesoporous non-silica materials have shown unique properties in many fields such as heterogeneous catalysis and energy conversion and storage. Many studies have been devoted to the synthesis of mesoporous transition-metal-containing materials. However, the range of materials that can be made is mainly limited to oxides. In this work, we developed an oxide-to-sulfide transformation approach as a general synthetic method to prepare ordered mesoporous metal sulfides. Three first-row transition-metal sulfides, FeS2, CoS2, and NiS2, with highly ordered mesoporous structures and crystalline walls have been successfully synthesized for the first time. A preliminary investigation was performed to explore the photocatalytic properties of the newly synthesized mesoporous metal sulfides. All of the mesoporous metal sulfides exhibited higher activity than their bulk counterparts for the photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue dye under visible-light irradiation. More importantly, the preparation method introduced in this work may be extended to other mesoporous metal chalcogenides for a variety of potential applications.