title: Free-standing mesoporous carbon thin films with highly ordered pore architectures for nanodevices.
abstract: We report for the first time the synthesis of free-standing mesoporous carbon films with highly ordered pore architecture by a simple coating-etching approach, which have an intact morphology with variable sizes as large as several square centimeters and a controllable thickness of 90 nm to ∼3 μm. The mesoporous carbon films were first synthesized by coating a resol precursors/Pluronic copolymer solution on a preoxidized silicon wafer and forming highly ordered polymeric mesostructures based on organic-organic self-assembly, followed by carbonizing at 600 °C and finally etching of the native oxide layer between the carbon film and the silicon substrate. The mesostructure of this free-standing carbon film is confirmed to be an ordered face-centered orthorhombic Fmmm structure, distorted from the (110) oriented body-centered cubic Im3̅m symmetry. The mesoporosity of the carbon films has been evaluated by nitrogen sorption, which shows a high specific BET surface area of 700 m(2)/g and large uniform mesopores of ∼4.3 nm. Both mesostructures and pore sizes can be tuned by changing the block copolymer templates or the ratio of resol to template. These free-standing mesoporous carbon films with cracking-free uniform morphology can be transferred or bent on different surfaces, especially with the aid of the soft polymer layer transfer technique, thus allowing for a variety of potential applications in electrochemistry and biomolecule separation. As a proof of concept, an electrochemical supercapacitor device directly made by the mesoporous carbon thin films shows a capacitance of 136 F/g at 0.5 A/g. Moreover, a nanofilter based on the carbon films has shown an excellent size-selective filtration of cytochrome c and bovine serum albumin.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Molecular Catalysis and Innovative Materials, Laboratory of Advanced Materials, Fudan University, Shanghai, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Dan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.forename: Yingying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Lv
authors.forename: Zhangxiong
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Yuqian
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Dou
authors.forename: Lu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Han
authors.forename: Zhenkun
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.forename: Yongyao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xia
authors.forename: Gengfeng
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.forename: Dongyuan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zhao
mesh_terms: D002244:Carbon / Q000737:chemistry*; D008567:Membranes, Artificial; D049329:Nanostructures / Q000737:chemistry*; D010316:Particle Size; D016062:Porosity; D013499:Surface Properties
chemical_list: D008567:Membranes, Artificial; D002244:Carbon