Hierarchically Porous Carbons Derived from Nonporous Coordination Polymers

Hierarchically porous carbons (HPCs) with multimodal pore systems exhibit great technological potentials, especially in the fields of heterogeneous catalysis, energy storage, and conversion. Here, we establish a simple and general approach to HPCs by carbonization of nonporous coordination polymers that are produced by mixing metal salts with polytopic ligands in alkaline aqueous solutions at room temperature. The proposed approach is applicable to a wide scope of ligand molecules (18 examples), thus affording the synthesized HPCs with high diversity in porosity, morphology, and composition. In particular, the prepared HPCs exhibit high specific surface areas (up to 2647 m² g^-1) and large pore volumes (up to 2.39 cm³ g^-1). The HPCs-supported atomically dispersed Fe-N catalysts show much-improved fuel cell cathode performance over the micropore-dominated carbon black-supported catalysts, demonstrating the structural superiority of the HPCs for enhancing the mass transport properties.