Glyoxal mediated assembly of hollow carbon nanococoon for high-performance supercapacitor
Introduction
Due to the combined features of carbon materials and hollow nanostructure, design and fabrication of hollow carbon nanostructure with porous microstructure [[1], [2], [3]] has long been a hotspot since this unique structure offers various promising application potentiality in many fields such as sorption, catalysis, lithium battery, drug release and etc.
To date, two types of fabrication methods, namely, StÖber and CVD methods were exploited to assemble carbon hollow nanostructure. The StÖber method [[4], [5], [6], [7]] usually adopts monodispersed silica nanoparticles as template to mould the carbon hollow nanostructure, which has been previously testified that Stöber-like sol-gel synthesis could be extended for the preparation of uniform carbon-based solid/hollow microspheres. The CVD method [8] generally employs catalytically-active templates such as NiO, Co3O4, MgO as catalyst and templates to prepare hollow carbon nanostructure by in-situ decomposition of carbonacous precursors on the adopted templates. Since the microstructure of the adopted templates in CVD method could be efficiently maintained and duplicated, thus a well-defined hollow carbon could be prepared by the CVD method. But the CVD method usually needs fussy procedure and special equipment [9]. Despite these great efforts, the synthesis of a hollow nanostructure by an aqueous method instead of StÖber and CVD methods remains challenging.
As shown in Fig. 1, herein, we reported a unique glyoxal mediated assembly approach using phenol as starting material and commercial MgO with oval-shaped morphology as template to fabricate hollow carbon nanococoon. In our strategy, the adopted MgO could in situ catalyze the polymerization of glyoxal and phenol to form the composite of MgO@phenolic resin. After carbonization and template removal, a carbon nanostructure with nanococoon morphology well duplicated from the template was obtained. As electrode for supercapacitor (SC), the derived hollow nanostructure exhibits a superior SC performances with large current density of 30.7 Wh/kg and good rate capability.
Section snippets
Synthesis
Typically, 0.01 mol phenol and 0.03 mol aldehydes (glyoxal, 4,4′-Biphenyldicarboxaldehyde or terephthaldehyde) were dispersed in 10 ml anhydrous ethanol to get the precursor solution. About 4.0 g commercial MgO was added to the precursor solution to an incipient state to obtain a composite of MgO@precursor. The composite was placed under room temperature for 48 h to undergo a spontaneous self-polymerization process to get the phenolic resin@MgO. Finally, the phenolic resin@MgO was carbonized at
Results and discussion
As shown in Fig. S1 in supporting information (SI), the SEM image of the commercial MgO show that the adopted templates owns a oval-shaped morphology, which favors the construction of hollow nanostructure. The morphology of the derived GPC973 was confirmed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) technique. The TEM images in Fig. 2a−2c confirm the hollow structure with nanococoon morphology of GPC973, which verified the formation of hollow carbon nanostructure by the developed approach. The
Conclusion
In conclusion, a simple glyoxal mediated assembly approach was presented and applied to the synthesis of hollow carbon nanococoon structure. Systematical studies show that aldehyde type greatly influence the morphology of the final carbons. When 4,4′-Biphenyldicarboxaldehyde or terephthaldehyde were employed as starting materials, the corresponding derived carbons (BPC973 and TPC973) all possess a porous morphology instead of hollow one. The derived hollow carbon nanostructure possesses high
Author statement
Peiyao Luo: Writing - original draft. Zhengfang Tian: Investigation and Methodology. Wanju Zhang: Data curation and Formal analysis. Mingjiang Xie and Tielin Wang: Conceptualization and Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgment
This work was financially supported by the Naturally Science Foundation of Hubei Province (2019CFB626), the science and technology innovation team plan for the youths in universities of Hubei province (T2020021) and the Initial Research Fund (2042019023) of Huanggang Normal University. The authors thank Prof. C.T. Au for helpful suggestions.
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