Mesoporous carbon materials have an ordered structure,
uniform pore size. They often were synthesized by two methods:
soft-templating and hard-templating. With the soft-templating
method, materials have been prepared via self-assembly by using
soft-templating (surfactant). The obtained materials have less orderly
structure. The pore size of the material is difficult to control and the
template is difficult to remove. With the hard-templating method,
MCM-48, SBA-15, etc. are used as the templates. The materials have
highly order structure, uniform and easily controlled pore size.
Therefore, hard-templating method is used more widely. However,
the pore size of materials is smaller than that of the hard-templates
because obtained materials are inverse copies of the templates.
The thickness of the wall and the pore size are limited by size and
shape form of hard-templates. So far, the pore size of mesoporous
carbon materials are synthesized by hard-templating method only
reach the maximum of ~ 5.5 nm. The increasing in pore size is not
feasible because it is limited by the size of the templates, resulting in
framework collapse and pore breakage due to decrease stability.
Hence, it is necessary to find new methods to synthesize mesoporous
carbon materials with larger sizes, higher stability.