Speaker
Description
Nanoporous carbons gather much attentions as a key material for the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), because of the high volumetric capacities and the molecular sieving characters for industrially important gas molecules, like CH4 and CO2. Recently, the synthesis of various types of nanoporous carbons has been reported, including top-down synthesis by activation of variety of parent carbon matrix and bottom-up synthesis by chemical vapor depositions of hydrocarbons. In particular, one can obtain distinctive nanoporous carbon materials with controlled pore sizes and uniformed pore geometries from hard template synthesis methods with periodic mesoporous silica and zeolite. However, there are some problems on the template synthesis because of the harmful mold removing process using highly corrosive agents like HF. Here, we report the possibility of seif-template synthesis of nanoporous carbons from π-conjugated ionic liquids with molecular nanocarbon functionalities without the harmful mold removing process.
Ionic liquids (ILs) are room-temperature molten salts which exist in a liquid state without any solvent molecules. One of the most important characteristics of ILs is the diversity of the chemical compositions and the structures because of the organic-inorganic hybrid materials. Recently, our group have synthesized a new type of ILs in which π-conjugated molecular nanocarbons like naphthalene are introduced in the cation flameworks, and we call them π-conjugated ILs. Since the π-conjugated ILs are expected to have the both characteristics of molecular nanocarbons and of ILs, we have clarified the relationship between the photo-luminescence properties and the domain structure formation of the naphthalene moieties of π-conjugated ILs.
Furthermore, we could succeed to synthesize a porous carbon with both meso- and micro-porosities only by heat treatments of the π-conjugated IL without any template materials. The porosity could be originated from the domain structure of molecular nanocarbon moieties existing in π-conjugated ILs themselves. This fact indicates that we can precisely control the structures of porous carbon flameworks by using variety of π-conjugated ILs as a precursor. In our presentation, we will discuss the characteristics of the porous carbon and the relationship between the porosity and the microscopic structure of the precursor material of π-conjugated IL from hybrid reverse Monte Carlo simulation-aided X-ray scattering technique.
