Pr. Vanessa FIERRO

CNRS Research Director, Institut Jean Lamour, CNRS / Lorraine University, France.

Disordered and perfectly ordered mesoporous carbons (DMC and OMC, respectively) can be produced by soft- templating. An eco-friendly and easy synthesis method, by surfactant-water assisted mechanochemical mesostructuration of Mimosa tannin around the amphiphilic surfactant Pluronic F127© was used for the first time. It is an easy and fast, one-pot method, only requiring 1 h of ball-milling without any additional drying or curing step before carbonization. Furthermore, the method is environment-friendly, due to the use of a natural and renewable carbon precursor and due to the absence of toxic or hazardous substances during the synthesis. After carbonization at 900°C, carbons with moderate BET area (ABET), around 600 m2/g, were obtained and used for different applications. CO2 activation, which was more efficient in DMC, allowed obtaining materials with a more developed pore texture, ABET ~ 2000 m2/g. When these materials were used as electrodes of supercapacitors, they exhibited high values of capacitance together with a high specific energy and power. We will discuss the effect of pore connectivity on these performances and we will present the last strategies to improve the characterization of nanoporous materials.

Pr. Vanessa FIERRO : A CNRS Research Director presently working at Institut Jean Lamour (IJL). She pursued doctoral researches at the Institute of Carbochemistry (ICB-CSIC) and obtained her PhD from Zaragoza University (Spain) in 1998. She has been working several years as a researcher at the French Institute of Petroleum, at the Institute of Research on Catalysis and the Environment of Lyon (France) then at the Chemical Engineering School of Tarragona (Spain). She entered CNRS in 2006 and joined IJL in 2009 where she is now leading the Biosourced Materials Research Team since 2018.

Vanessa is a member of the Coal Technical Group 1 (TGK1) of the Research Fund for Coal and Steel (RFCS). She has more than 300 scientific publications, an h-index of 51 and an extensive background in the area of porous carbon materials for energy and environmental applications. Her current research interests focus on the development of materials from biosourced precursors able to substitute those of petrochemical origin.