Mechanism of forming an ink-bottle-like pore structure based on SBA-15 by a novel MOCVD technique

Metallorganic chemical vapor deposition is used as a novel simple pore tailoring method to fine-tune the pore opening size of SBA-15 materials without significant loss in pore volume and surface area. By using acetylene as carbon source and copper (II) acetylacetonate as precursor, the poremouth of SBA-15 is effectively reduced from 5.78 nm to 3.67 nm while maintaining the pore body at 5.78 nm. The effect of four pore modification factors-the ratio of acetylene/nitrogen, the feeding time of carbon precursor, the ratio of SBA-C/Cu(acac)₂ and the cycles of MOCVD on the final pore structure of the SBA-15/carbon/copper composite is studied. The morphology and microstructure of the resulting product SBA-C-Cu are characterized by XRD patterns, TEM images and EDS analysis. The XRD and TEM reveal that the SBA-C-Cu composite is highly hexagonally ordered and has similar particle morphology as the original SBA-15.