Huixia Feng

Doping ordered mesoporous carbon with electron-donating nitrogen and sulfur heteroatoms is a promising strategy to enhance its electrochemical performance. Here we demonstrate the successful fabrication of nitrogen and sulfur co-doped ordered mesoporous carbon (NSOMC) materials with high specific surface areas (978–1021 m2 g−1), large pore volumes (1.10–1.20 cm3 g−1), highly-ordered pore structures and controlled dopant contents (10.0–4.8 at.% for nitrogen and 1.7–2.6 at.% for sulfur) using the oligomer of pyrrole as the precursor and sulphuric acid as the catalyst and sulfur source. NSOMC materials exhibit enhanced electrochemical double-layer capacitance (EDLC) performances due to their improved surface activity and conductivity compared with pure carbon CMK-3. The fabrication of nitrogen and sulfur co-doped ordered mesoporous carbon with enhanced electrochemical capacitance performance provides a viable route to promote its applications in electronic devices.

In this contribution, nitrogen- and sulfur-codoped 3D cubic-ordered mesoporous carbon (KNOMC) materials with controlled dopant content (10.0-4.6 atom % for nitrogen and 0.94-0.75 atom % for sulfur) are presented, using KIT-6 as the template and pyrrole as the precursor, and its supercapacitive behavior is also investigated. The presented materials exhibit excellent supercapacitive performance by combining electrical double-layer capacitance and pseudocapacitance as well as the enhanced wettability and improved conductivity generated from the incorporation of nitrogen and sulfur into the framework of carbon materials. The specific capacitance of the presented materials reaches 320 F g(-1) at a current density of 1 A g(-1), which is significantly larger than that of the pristine-ordered mesoporous carbon reported in the literature and can even compete with some metal oxides and conducting polymers.

Conventional superhydrophobic surfaces have always depended on expensive, sophisticated, and fragile roughness structures. Therefore, poor robustness has turned into the bottleneck for large-scale industrial applications of the superhydrophobic surfaces. To handle this problem, a superhydrophobic surface with firm robustness urgently needs to be developed. In this work, we created a versatile strategy to fabricate robust, self-cleaning, and superhydrophobic surfaces for both soft and hard substrates. We created an ethanol based suspension of perfluorooctyltriethoxysilane-mdodified calcium carbonate nanoparticles which can be sprayed onto both hard and soft substrates to form superhydrophobic surfaces. For all kinds of substrates, spray adhesive was directly coated onto abluent substrate surfaces to promote the robustness. These superhydrophobic surfaces showed remarkable robustness against knife scratch and sandpaper abrasion, while retaining its superhydrophobicity even after 30 abrasion cycles with sandpaper. What is more, the superhydrophobic surfaces have shown promising potential applications in self-cleaning and oil-water separation. The surfaces retained their self-cleaning property even immersed in oil. In addition to oil-water separation, the water contents in oil after separation of various mixtures were all below 150 ppm, and for toluene even as low as 55 ppm. Furthermore, the as-prepared device for oil-water separation could be cycled 6 times and still retained excellent oil-water separation efficiency.