Functional Carbon Materials From Ionic Liquid Precursors

The use of ionic liquids (ILs) as precursors for functional carbon materials is reviewed, showing that they are highly promising starting compounds for this purpose: As liquids with negligible vapour pressure, simple processing and structural control of the resulting carbons can be achieved. The architecture of ILs allows for a wide combination of anions and cations, which can be used to tailor the amount of heteroatom-doping in the resulting carbon materials. As ILs are well compatible with a variety of compounds, carbon composites can be simply prepared. Considerable progress in applications of these materials has been presented for example as electrodes in fuel cells, supercapacitors or Li-ion batteries.