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

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.