Phenolic foam offer a multitude of advantage for energy saving and fire, however, they are brittleness and need to be improved. Nanostructured inorganic particles are good modifiers to enhance the toughness, but the problem is that inorganic particles have poor compatibility with polymer materials. To solve this problem, here SiO2and Poly acrylic acid (PAA) hybrid nanoparticles were used as a reinforcing agent, which were prepared by silica sol and polyacrylic acid. The analysis shows that the hybrid nanoparticles effectively improve the compressive strength, the compressive strength and cell structures.

New macroporous carbons are prepared using phenolic resin foam as a carbon precursor. The synthesis scheme consisted of: (a) preparation of the phenolic resin foams, (b) carbonization of the phenolic resin foams. The synthesized phenolic resin foams were modificated by the hybrid SiO2nanomaterials for the first. The obtained macroporous carbons with better air tightness have potential application in catalyst support. Moreover, the shape of the macroporous carbons could be controlled by simply adjusting the phenolic resin foams.