Hollow carbon micro spheres prepared from polystyrene microbeads

摘要

Hollow carbon microspheres (HCMs) exhibit unique properties including low weight,thermal insulation,and high compressive strength,and as a result can be applied to many industrial fields such as gas/energy storage,supports of catalytic systems,adsorbents 1,lubricants,etc.Various approaches,e.g.,self-assembly template processes 2,pyrolysis 3,reduction 4 and hydrothermal methods 5 have been carried out to prepare hollow and/or solid carbon microspheres with different yields and sizes.However,so far these methods possess some disadvantages in large-quantity production and size controllability of HCMs.Tamai et al.1 have reported the preparation of HCMs from core-shell structure microspheres of polysty-rene/polyacrylonitrile composition,in which polystyrene (PS) was used as core and polyacrylonitrile as carbon shell precursor.When the polymer material is carbonized,the polymer core part is eliminated,and the shell is transformed into a carbon nanocapsule.