The sustainable, one-pot and high-yield synthesis of ultrafine carbonaceous nanospheres with high anionic separation efficiency

The unique and tunable size-dependent properties (less than 100 nm) make ultrafine carbonaceous nanospheres (UCNSs) superior and promising in plentiful modern technological applications. However, fabricating monodiperse UCNSs in quantity was still challenging, especially via a sustainable way. This article presents a one-pot high-concentration hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) of glucose under the aid of polyquaternium-11 to fabricate monodisperse UCNSs with controllable sizes of 51-100 nm. The monodispersity of UCNSs can even be achieved at glucose concentration of 500 g L-1 and in 5-fold enlarged HTCs, with output up to 38.1 g. A novel green strategy based on the thiol-ene click chemistry with cysteine in aqueous system were further designed for the hyperbranched polyquaternary amine grafting of UCNSs without negligible damage on their monodispersity. Grafted UCNSs were applied as latices in ion chromatography packing, showing high separation efficiencies for common anions with better peak symmetry compared with reported or common commercial latex-agglomerated counterparts to the best of our knowledge.

Automated summary

This study introduces a green and sustainable method for fabricating monodisperse ultrafine carbonaceous nanospheres (UCNSs) with controllable sizes, utilizing a high-concentration hydrothermal carbonization process. A novel strategy based on thiol-ene click chemistry is proposed to graft hyperbranched polyquaternary amine onto UCNSs without compromising their monodispersity. The grafted UCNSs show improved separation efficiencies in ion chromatography packing, outperforming common commercial latex-agglomerated counterparts.