N-doped hollow mesoporous carbon spheres by improved dissolution-capture for supercapacitors

Abstract N-doped hollow mesoporous carbon sphere (N-HMCS) has attracted increasing attention as supercapacitor materials due to its rich mesoporous structure, large cavity, high surface area and suitable N-doping, etc. Herein, an improved dissolution-capture method is applied for preparation of N-HMCS using 3-aminophenol-formaldehyde (AF) resin spheres as carbon precursor. In this process, AF resin spheres preparation, mesoporous silica coating, dissolution-capture are implemented by one-pot process without multiple separation operation, which is beneficial for large-scale preparation. Mesoporous silica shell is in-situ coated on the surface of AF resin spheres, and AF oligomer, which is dissolved in N, N-dimethylformamide, is captured by mesopores on the silica shell. The obtained N-HMCS exhibits a relatively regular spherical shape, carbon shell with rich mesoporous, high surface area and nitrogen doping. As electrode materials in supercapacitor, the N-HMCS shows outstand performance with a high capacitance and a good capacitance retention, indicating its excellent promising in energy storage.