Morphological characterization of microporous carbon materials

摘要

The development of microporous carbon materials has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. The potential applications of these materials include catalyst support, adsorbents, molecular sieves, porous electrodes and other battery components [1-4]. In addition, these microporous carbon materials have been used as preforms for infiltration with molten silicon or silicon alloys to produce silicon carbide based advanced ceramics for a variety of high temperature applications [5-10]. The melt infiltration kinetics and mechanism of reactions between liquid infiltrants and the porous carbon depend on a number of factors including the preform permeability, which is quite sensitive to small changes in pore structure. The permeability of the porous preform and fluid flow of the infiltrant changes due to volume change accompanied by the silicon-carbon reaction during the infiltration process, with the potential for choking-off and other undesirable results. In order to produce silicon carbide based ceramics with homogeneous second phase distribution and to maintain good control of the melt infiltration process, it is necessary to fabricate microporous carbon preforms with controlled morphology and pore size distributions.