Tailoring microporosity and nitrogen content in carbons for achieving high uptake of CO 2 at ambient conditions
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Tailoring microporosity and nitrogen content in carbons for achieving high uptake of CO2 at ambient conditions Nilantha P. Wickramaratne • Mietek Jaroniec
Received: 17 May 2013 / Accepted: 29 August 2013 / Published online: 8 September 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract A series of nitrogen-containing carbon spheres (CS) was prepared using the modified Sto¨ber method. These CS were synthesized by using resorcinol and formaldehyde as carbon precursors, melamine as nitrogen precursor and ammonia as a polymerization reaction catalyst. Hydrothermal treatment followed by activation of these polymer spheres resulted in highly porous nitrogen-containing CS. Elemental analysis and N2 adsorption showed that the aforementioned CS exhibited high surface area (reaching 1,610 m2/g) with large fraction of fine micropores (volume of micropores smaller than 1 nm was estimated to be 0.40 cm3/g) and comparatively high nitrogen content (about 4.0 at.%). Interestingly, high CO2 adsorption capacities, 4.4 and 6.9 mmol/g, were obtained for these CS at 1 bar and two temperatures, 25 and 0 °C, respectively. Keywords CO2 adsorption Activated carbon spheres Nitrogen-containing carbon spheres CO2 activation
1 Introduction Global warming is one of the most studied atmospheric phenomena during past decade; there is a common believe that it is mainly due to greenhouse gases such as CO2, water vapor, N2O, and CH4. Among them CO2 is probably the main contributor to the global warming. The reduction of carbon dioxide emissions has attracted a great attention N. P. Wickramaratne M. Jaroniec (&) Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242, USA e-mail: [email protected]
because this gas is considered as one of the most destructive anthropogenic contributors for both global warming and climate change. In the last few years, the CO2 amount in atmosphere continued to increase with an alarming rate. The main contributors to this increase are vehicular emissions, fossil-fired power plants, deforestation and chemical processes. It was shown that 77 % of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission comes from fossil fuel-fire power plants (coal, petroleum, and natural gas) totaling 38 Gt in 2004; it is predicted that this number will grow in the future and about 50 % increase is expected by 2030 (D’Alessandro et al. 2010; Samanta et al. 2012). In the recent years, various types of porous adsorbents, including metal organic frameworks (MOF), zeolites, silica, metal oxides, and carbon materials have been investigated for CO2 capture (An et al. 2010; Liu et al. 2012a; Grajciar et al. 2012; Zukal et al. 2011; Broda and Mu¨ller 2012; Sevilla and Fuertes 2011). Among them, carbon materials gained much attention because they exhibit several advantages in comparison to the aforementioned other porous materials. Namely, carbon materials: (1) possess better chemical and physical properties (namely, higher resistance to water due to hydrophobicity, higher thermal stability, controllable pore structure,
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