Kinetics-Controlled Synthesis of Ordered Mesoporous Carbon Single Crystals from Liquefied Wood

The architectures of carbon materials prepared via soft-templating method greatly depend on the assembly pattern of micelles. Herein, a kinetics-controlled strategy is developed to fabricate ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC) single crystals from liquefied wood by using melamine to regulate the polymerization rate of carbon precursors, which further affects the assembly process. Due to the slow hydroxymethylation reaction of melamine with formaldehyde in acid, the addition of melamine can decelerate the reaction kinetics to produce no seed nuclei at the initial stage, which favors the composite micelles to orderly aggregate and further grow in a layer-by-layer pattern to form OMC single crystals after carbonization. The OMC single crystals with high specific surface areas (733 m 2 g −1 ), uniform mesopore size (3.2 nm), and ordered Im3m mesostructure are ideal supports to couple with Ag nanoparticles to act as efficient catalysts, which exhibits remarkable catalytic performance for the reduction of 4-nitrophenol.