Mechanochemistry: A Green, Activation-Free and Top-Down Strategy to High-Surface-Area Carbon Materials

Abstract

Renewable resources (e.g., agricultural byproducts) are widely used in the production of commercial activated carbon, but the activation procedures still have serious drawbacks. Here we develop a green, activation-free, top-down method to prepare high-surface-area carbon materials from agricultural wastes through mechanochemistry. The facile mechanochemical process can smash the monolithic agricultural wastes into tiny microparticles with abundant surfaces and bulk defects, which leads to the generation of well-developed hierarchical porous structures after direct carbonization. The as-obtained carbon materials simultaneously present high surface areas (1771 m2 g–1) and large pore volumes (1.88 cm3 g–1), and thus demonstrate excellent electrochemical performances as the interlayer for lithium–sulfur batteries and much superior creatinine adsorption capabilities to the medicinal charcoal tablets. These results provide a new direction for fabricating high-surface-area porous materials without any toxic reagents or complicated activation procedures, and can spur promising electrochemical and medical applications.

Mechanochemical Preparation of Pd(II) and Pt(II) Composites with Carbonaceous Materials and Their Application in the Suzuki-Miyaura Reaction at Several Energy Inputs

“…For comparative purposes, palladium composites with GO and MWCNT were similarly prepared by grinding in ball mill. As it was indicated above, the use of the carbon-based material aims to improve the catalyst activity and stability in the reaction medium, allowing its recovery and reuse [2][3][4][5][6][7][17][18][19][20][21][25][26][27][28][29]. ICP-MS analysis of the supported Pd and Pt catalysts was carried out to evaluate the actual loading amounts of Pd and Pt on AC.…”

“…Moreover, the use of supported Pd may prevent its aggregation upon reduction with the respective drop in activity [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]. Among different carbon materials, activated carbon (AC) is the most used and studied support for Pd catalysts and in the C-C coupling chemistry due to its low price and abundance, unique chemical and mechanical properties [ 20 , 21 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 ]. Thus, carbon is a high tensile material, able to sustain the amount of energy produced in ball milling, with the advantage of not inhibiting the SM reaction.…”

Dimethyl Sulfoxide Solvent Engineering for High Quality Cation‐Anion‐Mixed Hybrid and High Efficiency Perovskite Solar Cells

“…added benzoquinone (BQ) into precursor of PbI 2 and MAI, adjusted the molecular interactions between BQ and MAI, retarded the formation speed of the crystallization of perovskite, leading to dense, pin‐hole free perovskite films with better crystal and larger grains . Including heat treatment temperature and light irradiation, the preparation conditions have a significant influence on the properties of perovskite thin films …”

“…[24] Including heat treatment temperature and light irradiation, the preparation conditions have a significant influence on the properties of perovskite thin films. [25][26][27][28][29] In previous work, solvent engineering has been carried out on perovskite, which is an effective method for controlling the morphology of perovskite film in the one-step deposition process. Seok and co-workers added dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a strong coordinating solvent, into the γ-butylolacone (GBL) precursor solution and then drop-casting toluene onto the spin-coating perovskite films, and in the perovskite crystal growing process the wet films formed a CH 3 NH 3 I-DMSO-PbI 2 intermediate phase and that significantly improved the films quality from one-step method.…”

Rechargeable Battery Electrolytes Capable of Operating over Wide Temperature Windows and Delivering High Safety

“…Li-S batteries (LSBs) have been extensively investigated due to their high theoretical energy density (2600 Wh kg −1 ) and potentially low cost due to the abundance of sulfur. [55][56][57][58][59] Nonetheless, the safety of LSB technology remains a challenge, especially because of the presence of flammable organic solvents, polysulfide shuttle, and the uncontrollable growth of Li dendrites. [16,18,60] To realize high performance and safe LSBs, the Wang group [38] developed a nonflammable electrolyte consisting of lithium bis(fluorosulfonyl)imide (LiFSI) and a flame-retarding co-solvent composed of 1,1,2,2-tetrafluoroethyl-2,2,3,3-tetrafluoropropyl ether (TTE) and TEP.…”