Easy synthesis of iron doped ordered mesoporous carbon with tunable pore sizes

Precise control of the pore sizes for porous carbon materials is of importance to study the confinement effect of metal particles because the pore size in nanosize range will decide the physical and chemical properties of the metal nanoparticles. In this paper, we report a new approach for the synthesis of iron doped ordered mesoporous carbon materials with adjustable pore size using Fe-SBA-15 as hard template and boric acid as the pore expanding reagent. The pore size can be precisely adjusted by a step of 0.4 nm in the range of 3–6 nm. The carbonization temperature can be lowered to 773 K due to the catalytic role of the doped iron. The present approach is suitable for facile synthesis of metal imbedded porous carbon materials with tunable pore sizes.