Conventional synthesis of functional materials relies heavily on water and organic solvents. Alternatively, the synthesis of functional materials using, or in the presence of, ionic liquids represents a burgeoning direction in materials chemistry. Ionic liquids are a family of non-conventional molten salts that can act as both templates and precursors to functional materials, as well as solvent. They offer many advantages, such as negligible vapor pressures, wide liquidus ranges, good thermal stability, tunable solubility of both organic and inorganic molecules, and much synthetic flexibility.  The unique solvation environment of these ionic liquids provides new reaction media for controlling formation of polymeric materials and tailoring morphologies of advanced materials. We have described a simple, convenient, and catalyst-free approach for synthesizing high surface area N-doped porous carbons based on open vessel polymerization and thermolysis of a task-specific ionic liquid (TSIL) carrying char-forming nitrile functionality on the cation or anion. The structural morphology (porosity and surface area) of the resulting carbon is strongly dependent on the nature of the cation/anion pairing within the TSIL. Notably, a mesoporous carbon was successfully synthesized by direct carbonization of a TSIL precursor which acted as a self-porogen in the absence of either solvent or template species. This novel strategy can be extended to incorporate other carbon-producing functionality as well as more structurally diverse ions and highlights several exciting opportunities in functional carbon composites. These possibilities and others form the subject of current investigation in our labs. Challenges and opportunities in this research area will be discussed. Acknowledgments : This work was conducted at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and supported by the Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy, under contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with UT-Battelle, LLC.

Ionic liquids for controlled synthesis of functional carbon materials

245th National Meeting (2013)

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