Conversion of waste plastic into ordered mesoporous carbon for electrochemical applications
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College of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Engineering, Hebei University of Science and Technology, Shijiazhuang 050018, China Address all correspondence to this author. e-mail: [email protected]
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Received: 4 September 2018; accepted: 12 December 2018
The excessive use of plastic, especially polystyrene (PS), has caused serious environmental pollution. The efficient utilization of plastics and the conversion of plastics into value-added carbon materials are the concerns of researchers. Herein, we propose novel “pyrolysis–deposition” method to convert one popular plastic substance, PS, into ordered mesoporous carbons (OMCs). During the synthesis process, PS is pyrolyzed into small organic gases under high temperature, which is then adsorbed through capillary adsorption into the mesoporous of SBA-15 in the presence of catalyst. The obtained OMCs have high specific surface area, uniform pore size, and ordered pore structure. The OMCs exhibit specific capacitance of 118 F/g at a current density of 0.2 A/g and electrochemical stability of 87.2% at a current density of 2 A/g after 5000 cycles. The pyrolysis– deposition strategy provides a new idea to convert waste plastics into high-performance carbon materials for electrochemical applications.
Introduction Plastic has been one of the most widely used synthetic polymers in a range of applications from food containers to space suits, with attracting features of flexibility, light weight, and low cost [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. However, pollution caused by plastics is a worrying issue. About 15–20% of waste plastics can be recycled by conventional recycling techniques, such as sorting, grinding, washing, and extrusion, but the vast majority end up as trash [6, 7]. The discarded plastics are problematic in natural environment because they exist in some form for a long time. Polystyrene (PS) is one of the most widely used plastic and does not biodegrade for hundreds of years [4, 6, 7, 8, 9]. It is a formidable task to recycle and dispose PS products. Actually, most PS products are not currently recycled because of lack of economic benefits. On the other hand, as an aromatic hydrocarbon, PS is a potential carbon source. Exploratory research has been done in many groups. Xu and colleagues used styrene as a carbon precursor to prepare hollow monodisperse carbon nanospheres after cross-linking of styrene and carbonization [10]. Hollow spherical sludge carbons were prepared by pyrolyzing PS wastes covered with sewage sludge [11]. Our group has reported a “dissolution–capture” method
ª Materials Research Society 2019
to synthesize hollow mesoporous carbon spheres using PS as the carbon source [12]. Cross-linking reactions occur during the synthesis processes to gain a high carbon yield. However, organic solvents and catalysts are required for successful synthesis, and the morphology and structure of the hollow carbon spheres are not always satisfactory. The ordered mesoporous carbons (OMCs) with high surface area, large pore volume, uniform pore size, good mass transfer channels, and a large n
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