Space-Confined Polymerization: Controlled Fabrication of Nitrogen-Doped Polymer and Carbon Microspheres with Refined Hierarchical Architectures

The construction of refined architectures plays a crucial role in performance improvement and application expansion of advanced materials. The synthesis of carbon microspheres with a refined hierarchical structure is still a problem in synthetic methodology, because it is difficult to achieve the necessary delicate control of the interior structure and outer shell across the microscale to nanoscale. Nitrogen-doped multichamber carbon (MCC) microspheres with a refined hierarchical structure are realized here via a surfactant-directed space-confined polymerization strategy. The MCC precursor is not the traditional phenolic resol but a new kind of 2,6-diaminopyridine-based multichamber polymer (MCP) with a high nitrogen content up to 20 wt%. The morphology and sizes of MCP microspheres can be easily controlled by a dual-surfactant system. The as-synthesized MCC with a highly microporous shell, a multichamber inner core, and beneficial N-doping can serve as a promising supercapacitor material.