Liquid Na/K Alloy Interfacial Synthesis of Functional Porous Carbon at Ambient Temperature

The functional groups in porous carbon generally suffer a severe loss during the high-temperature carbonization. Instead, the low-temperature synthesis of carbon featuring porous structures and abundant functional groups is not only a solution that evades the pitfalls of pyrolysis but also is of significance for the development of synthetic methodology. Herein, a liquid metal interfacial engineering strategy is reported for the synthesis of porous carbon using CCl4 as the carbon precursor and sodium-potassium alloy (NaK) as the reducing agent, which is superior to traditional synthetic methods because it enables the engineering of a highly active liquid metal alloy microemulsion to directly generate porous carbon at ambient temperature. As synthesized porous carbon featured abundant carbon-chlorine bonds can be tandem-grafted with imidazole and 1,2-dibromoethane to achieve a CO2 cycloaddition catalyst, which exhibits excellent catalytic activity, in addition to exceptional stability.

Automated summary

A liquid metal interfacial engineering strategy was developed for the synthesis of porous carbon with abundant functional groups using CCl4 as the carbon precursor and NaK as the reducing agent. This method allows for the direct generation of porous carbon at ambient temperature through the engineering of a highly active liquid metal alloy microemulsion. The synthesized porous carbon can be tandem-grafted with specific compounds to achieve a CO2 cycloaddition catalyst, which exhibits excellent catalytic activity and stability.