An easy co-casting method to synthesize mesostructured carbon composites with high magnetic separability and acid resistance

Magnetic mesoporous carbon composites with high surface areas and narrow mesopore size distributions were directly replicated from SBA-15 by a simple co-casting method and the amount of incorporated magnetic particles and saturation magnetization value can be easily tuned by changing the added amount of iron source during synthesis. Furthermore, the magnetic mesoporous carbon composites show good acid resistance due to a carbon shell coating structure around the magnetic particles, which is spontaneously formed during the replication process of the mesoporous carbon composites. The characteristics of the as-synthesized magnetic mesoporous carbon composites were examined by X-ray diffraction, N₂ sorption, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Mössbauer spectroscopy and vibrating-sample magnetometry.