Liquid Na/K Alloy Interfacial Synthesis of Functional Porous Carbon at Ambient Temperature

Abstract

The functional groups in porous carbon generally suffer a severe loss during the high‐temperature carbonization. Instead, the low‐temperature synthesis of carbon featuring porous structures and abundant functional groups is not only a solution that evades the pitfalls of pyrolysis but also is of significance for the development of synthetic methodology. Herein, a liquid metal interfacial engineering strategy is reported for the synthesis of porous carbon using CCl4 as the carbon precursor and sodium‐potassium alloy (NaK) as the reducing agent, which is superior to traditional synthetic methods because it enables the engineering of a highly active liquid metal alloy microemulsion to directly generate porous carbon at ambient temperature. As synthesized porous carbon featured abundant carbon‐chlorine bonds can be tandem‐grafted with imidazole and 1,2‐dibromoethane to achieve a CO2 cycloaddition catalyst, which exhibits excellent catalytic activity, in addition to exceptional stability.