Synthesis of Highly Ordered Mesoporous Crystalline WS2 and MoS2 via a High-Temperature Reductive Sulfuration Route

A high-temperature reductive sulfuration method is demonstrated to synthesize highly ordered mesoporous metal sulfide crystallites by using mesoporous silica as hard templates. H2S gas is utilized as a sulfuration agent to in situ convert phosphotungstic acid H3PW12O40.6H2O to hexagonal WS2 crystallites in the silica nanochannels at 600 degrees C. Upon etching silica, mesoporous, layered WS2 nanocrystal arrays are produced with a yield as high as 96 wt %. XRD, nitrogen sorption, SEM, and TEM results reveal that the WS2 products replicated from the mesoporous silica SBA-15 hard template possess highly ordered hexagonal mesostructure (space group, p6mm) and rodlike morphology, analogous to the mother template. The S-W-S trilayers of the WS2 nanocrystals are partially oriented, parallel to the mesochannels of the SBA-15 template. This orientation is related with the reduction of the high-energy layer edges in layered metal dichalcogenides and the confinement in anisotropic nanochannels. The mesostructure can be 3-D cubic bicontinuous if KIT-6 (Iad) is used as a hard template. Mesoporous WS2 replicas have large surface areas (105-120 m2/g), pore volumes ( approximately 0.20 cm3/g), and narrow pore size distributions ( approximately 4.8 nm). By one-step nanocasting with the H3PMo12O40.6H2O (PMA) precursor into the mesochannels of SBA-15 or KIT-6 hard template, highly ordered mesoporous MoS2 layered crystallites with the 2-D hexagonal (p6mm) and 3-D bicontinuous cubic (Iad) structures can also be prepared via this high-temperature reductive sulfuration route. When the loading amount of PMA precursor is low, multiwalled MoS2 nanotubes with 5-7 nm in diameter can be obtained. The high-temperature reductive sulfuration method is a general strategy and can be extended to synthesize mesoporous CdS crystals and other metal sulfides.