Hierarchical Multimodal Mesoporous Carbon Materials with Parallel Macrochannels

Hierarchically structured multimodal meso-macroporous carbon materials have been prepared by using the nanoreplication of the mesoporous walls of a meso-macroporous zirconia exotemplate. Like the zirconia exotemplate, the pure carbon material possesses funnel shaped straight macrochannels, parallel to each other and perpendicular to the tangent of the particles' dense mesoporous shell. As a result of the funnel-like shape, each macrochannel has a pore size gradient with a large opening centered at 300−700 nm. The walls of the macrochannels and the dense mesoporous shells are formed by a hierarchical mesostructured porous system with uniform mesopore sizes centered at 3, 15−17, and 25−50 nm. Macrochannels are interconnected with hierarchically mesostructured walls and shells. A high surface area of 950 m 2 /g with a mesopore volume of 0.44 cm 3 /g is obtained. The possibility of the nanoreplication of other meso-macroporous oxides such as aluminosilicates, titania, and niobium oxide with different macrochannel size, shape, and organization has also been studied to generate meso-macroporous carbon materials with different organizations of the macrochannels.