"Cooking carbon in a solid salt": Synthesis of porous heteroatom-doped carbon foams for enhanced organic pollutant degradation under visible light

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple bottom-up method to synthesize porous heteroatom-doped carbon foams with high surface area and nitrogen doping, enhancing visible-light-driven degradation of organic pollutants more effectively than existing catalysts.

Contribution

Introduces a novel 'cooking carbon in a solid salt' strategy for creating hierarchical porous heteroatom-doped carbon foams with superior catalytic properties.

Findings

Carbon foams exhibit micro-/meso-/macropores and high surface area.

Doped nitrogen enhances catalytic activity.

Outperforms traditional metal-/carbon-based catalysts in pollutant degradation.

Abstract

Porous heteroatom-doped carbons are desirable for catalytic reactions due to their tunable physicochemical properties, low cost and metal-free nature. Herein, we introduce a facile general bottom-up strategy, so-called "cooking carbon in a solid salt", to prepare hierarchically porous heteroatom-doped carbon foams by using poly(ionic liquid) as precursor and common inorganic salts as structural template. The obtained carbon foams bear micro-/meso-/macropores, large specific surface area and rich nitrogen dopant. The combination of these favorable features facilitates the catalytic degradation of aqueous organic pollutants by persulfate under visible light irradiation, in which they prevail over the state-of-the-art metal-/carbon-based catalysts.