Ordered Mesoporous Carbons with High Micropore Content and Tunable Structure Prepared by Combined Hard and Salt Templating as Electrode Materials in Electric Double-Layer Capacitors

Synthesis of high surface area carbon materials with hierarchical pore structure is reported. Combined salt templating with ZnCl2 and hard templating with SBA-15 is used to produce ordered mesoporous and microporous hard-salt-templated carbons (OM-HSTCs) from simple sucrose as carbon precursor. OM-HSTCs achieve specific surface areas of more than 2600 m(2) g(-1) and total pore volumes up to 2.2 cm(3) g(-1). In comparison to purely hard-templated ordered mesoporous carbons, the additional salt template leads to high micropore volume and provides control over the size/distribution of micro- and mesopores and over the carbon microstructure. This method combines carbonization and the formation of well-defined micropores in one step and is more versatile in terms of resulting pore structure than previously reported routes toward ordered mesoporous/microporous carbons. When applied as electrode materials in electric double-layer capacitors with 1 m tetraethylammonium tetrafluoroborate in acetonitrile organic electrolyte, OM-HSTCs combine high gravimetric capacitance (133 F g(-1) at 0.1 A g(-1)) resulting from high micropore volume with high capacitance retention under high-power conditions (126 F g(-1) at 40 A g(-1)), exceeding the purely microporous or purely ordered mesoporous reference materials.