Facile Synthesis of Hierarchically Ordered Porous Carbon via in Situ Self-Assembly of Colloidal Polymer and Silica Spheres and Its Use as a Catalyst Support

This article presents a one-pot method to synthesize hierarchically ordered porous carbons with interconnected macropores and mespores, via in situ self-assembly of colloidal polymer and silica spheres with sucrose as the carbon source. Compared with other techniques, this procedure is veritably simple; neither presynthesis of the macropore/mesopore or crystal templates nor additional infiltration is needed, and the self-assembly of polymer spheres into the crystal template and the infiltration are finished in situ in the same system. The sizes of macropores and mesopores can be independently tuned by the sizes of polymer and silica spheres, respectively. The obtained bimodal porous carbons have large BET surface areas, large pore volumes, and partially graphitized frameworks. They show very good support of the Pt-Ru alloy catalyst in a direct methanol fuel cell.