Kinetics-controlled superfast co-assembly to construct hollow mesoporous carbon spheres for high-performance supercapacitors

Hollow mesoporous carbon spheres (HMCSs) have widely used in energy storage, catalysis, adsorption and other fields, but the precise construction still faces challenges. Herein, by adjusting the hydrolysis/condensation rates between tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) and resorcinol, a kinetics-controlled ultra-fast co-assembly strategy is used to efficiently and conveniently construct a kind of deft HMCSs with tunable mesoporous channels and cavity sizes. Profiting by the highly interconnected three-dimensional nano-spaces, the HMCS with pore size of ∼12.2 nm has a specific surface area of 1231 m2 g−1, showing excellent performance of supercapacitor. Notably, the capacitance of HMCS reaches 294 F g−1 at the current density of 1 A g−1 in 6 M KOH electrolyte. In addition, 85 % of initial capacitance can be retained after 10000 cycles in a two-electrode system. These HMCSs have abundant large mesoporous, controllable structure, convenient preparation technology, which are expected to be more applied in the electrochemical field.