Ordered Mesoporous C-70 with Highly Crystalline Pore Walls for Energy Applications

Mesoporous materials with carbon framework structure can offer distinctive functionalities with tunable electronic or catalytic properties. Many synthetic routes including hard or soft templating approaches are developed for the fabrication of various ordered mesoporous carbon based materials which have demonstrated unique catalytic and energy storage properties. So far, most of these techniques deliver only mesoporous carbon with amorphous wall structures which limit their performance in many applications. Fullerenes exhibit unique structure and significant properties including superconductivity, electrochemical stability, and heat resistance. Herein, for the first time, the preparation of highly ordered mesoporous fullerene C-70 materials with tunable porous structure and controlled rod-shaped morphology through the thermal oligomerization of fullerene C-70 molecules inside the mesopore channels of SBA-15 silica as a hard template with the help of chlorinated aromatics, wherein the solubility of fullerenes is high, is reported. It is demonstrated that these metal-free mesoporous fullerene C-70 framework with a high surface area and bimodal pores with multifunctionality exhibit excellent performance in the oxygen reduction reaction for fuel cells and supercapacitors. This simple strategy can also be extended to other fullerene nanostructures with different carbon atoms which can exhibit interesting physicochemical properties and find applications in catalysis and energy storage.