Abstract: Mesoporous carbon materials are required for application in various areas. In our previous work, we successfully prepared mesoporous carbon with thin pore walls using inexpensive γ-alumina as a template and sucrose as the carbon source, and proposed a mechanism for the synthetic process. In this work, other carbon source was explored to improve the synthetic process and obtain a better understanding of the synthetic mechanism. Compared with sucrose, phenolic resin generated in situ as the carbon precursor can form a complete and robust carbon layer on the template surface in one polymerization and carbonization procedure, simplifying the synthetic process. In addition, the specific surface areas of the carbon materials were greatly increased when phenolic resin was used as the carbon precursor. According to the proposed synthetic mechanism, the mesopores of the carbon materials had two sources: the removal of template particles, and the original pores of the template. When the size of template pores differed significantly from that of the template particles, the obtained carbon materials possessed a bimodal pore size distribution (PSD) at about 4 and 13 nm. In this work, carbon material with a bimodal PSD in the mesopore range was obtained when thin, rod-like alumina was used as the template. The carbon materials possessed ultra large specific surface area (>1800 m²·g^-1) and pore volume (>4.5 cm³·g^-1), so they were used as electrodes for electric double-layer capacitors. Cyclic voltammograms were nearly rectangular even at a high sweep rate (50 mV·s^-1), and the capacitances were relatively high (about 200 F·g^-1). When the current density was increased from 0.1 A·g^-1 to 1.0 A·g^-1, the decrease in specific capacitance was only 10%.

Key words: Mesoporous carbon, Thin pore wall, Controllable synthesis, Bimodal pore size distribution, Phenolic resin, Electric double-layer capacitor