Ordered mesoporous carbon nanoparticles with well-controlled morphologies from sphere to rod via a soft-template route.

A facile soft-template method is used to synthesize highly ordered mesoporous carbon nanoparticles (MCNs) with well-controlled morphology from spherical to rod-like structures. Low-molecular-weight phenolic resol is used as carbon-yielding component and triblock copolymer Pluronic F127 as pore-forming component. The morphology of nanoparticles could be tuned by well controlling the concentration of F127. The results show that rod-shaped and worm-like mesoporous carbon nanoparticles can be obtained when the concentration of F127 is set at ~12 wt.% and 9 wt.%, respectively. The spherical nanoparticles are obtained when the concentration is reduced to 6 wt.%, and their size can be adjusted by further decreasing the F127 concentration. Moreover, the highly ordered mesostructure can be readily turned from 2D hexagonal (p6m) to 3D caged cubic (Im ̅3m) along with the tuning of morphologies from rod-shaped to spherical. The as-obtained MCNs exhibit large surface area (~1385 m(2)/g), high pore volume (~0.919 cm(3)/g), highly ordered mesostructure, and continuous electron transport framework. Hence, the obtained mesoporous carbon materials show excellent capacitance (~142 F/g at loading current density of 0.5A/g) in the application of supercapacitors.