Sequential Assembly Tailored Interior of Porous Carbon Spheres for Boosted Water Decontamination through Peroxymonosulfate Activation

Abstract

Self‐assembly is an appealing strategy for preparing nanospheres with different interiors, which are essential for their applications. Although many assembly strategies have been proposed, controlling the assembly processes from kinetic aspects is a big challenge. Here, by employing the different reaction kinetics of the assembly precursors, a sequential assembly strategy is proposed to tailor the interior structure of porous carbon spheres. Through changing the feeding interval of resin and silica precursors from 0 to 60 min, their nucleation order can be controlled in the assembly process to prepare porous carbon spheres (≈450 nm in size) with tunable type (i.e., hollow or solid) and size (from less than 100 nm to around 230 nm) of interiors. The hollow spheres exhibit over three times the catalytic activity of the core–shell counterparts for activating peroxymonosulfate to remove organic water contaminants, and the activity can be further improved by decreasing the cavity size. These results show the great significance of the sequential assembly strategy for interior engineering of nanospheres. This work opens up a new approach for rational design and synthesis of interior‐structured nanospheres.

A hierarchical spatial assembly approach of silica-polymer composites leads to versatile silica/carbon nanoparticles

“…Compared to literature reports on surfactant-free silica-polymer assembly (18,20,22,23,25,26,59,60), the major difference of the proposed HAS mechanism in this study is looking at the assembly at two length scales. One is the higher level of A I -B-A O core-shelltype assembly, the other is a secondary level of silica-polymer assembly in the middle layer whose structure is correlated to the silica/polymer ratio.…”

“…At another dimension, silicapolymer assembly may occur at the nanoscale (17)(18)(19). This approach has been applied to prepare both silica and carbon nanoparticles with unique structures, e.g., silica nanoparticles with rambutan-like surface roughness (20,21) and particle asymmetry (22), and carbon nanoparticles with invaginated structures (23,24), hollow cavities (25), tunable pore sizes (18), and pore structures (26).…”

MOF‐Derived Ni/ZIF‐8/ZnO Arrays on Carbon Fiber Cloth for Efficient Adsorption‐Catalytic Oxidation

“…[8] The application of peroxymonosulfate (PMS) based on advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) is a simple and efficient catalytic degradation process that presents environmental friendliness, moderate reaction conditions, and strong oxidation for removing refractory organic pollutants. [8,9] Nevertheless, reduced pollutant adsorption during catalytic degradation has been explored in previous studies. The method combining adsorption and PMS-AOP based on bifunctional materials is an effective way to remove pollutants while exhibiting complementary characteristics.…”

In Situ Growth of Z-Scheme Co/Al-LDH@Co3O4@Co-F Heterojunctions with Interfacial Enhancement and Synergistic Effects on a Cobalt Foam Surface for Environmental Remediation Studies

“…Among them, as an environmentally friendly, economical, and sustainable method, photocatalysis technology has attracted wide attention for its ability to remove organic pollutants and reduce the toxicity of heavy metals in water. 6,7 As the photocatalysis technology can use sunlight as the direct energy to remove various pollutants, it is called a "green chemical process" and has aroused great attention. 8,9 However, the performance of photocatalysts is severely limited by the ultrafast recombination of photocarriers.…”

“…At present, a series of environmental treatment technologies such as adsorption, Fenton, and superoxide oxidation have been developed to reduce the harmful effect of antibiotics. Among them, as an environmentally friendly, economical, and sustainable method, photocatalysis technology has attracted wide attention for its ability to remove organic pollutants and reduce the toxicity of heavy metals in water. , …”