Novel porous carbon materials with ultrahigh nitrogen contents for selective CO2 capture

Abstract

Nitrogen-doped carbon materials were prepared by a nanocasting route using tri-continuous mesoporous silica IBN-9 as a hard template. Rationally choosing carbon precursors and carefully controlling activation conditions result in an optimized material denoted as IBN9-NC1-A, which possesses a very high nitrogen doping concentration ($13 wt%) and a large surface area of 890 m 2 g À1 arising from micropores (<1 nm). It exhibits an excellent performance for CO 2 adsorption over a wide range of CO 2 pressures. Specifically, its equilibrium CO 2 adsorption capacity at 25 C reaches up to 4.50 mmol g À1 at 1 bar and 10.53 mmol g À1 at 8 bar. In particular, it shows a much higher CO 2 uptake at low pressure (e.g. 1.75 mmol g À1 at 25 C and 0.2 bar) than any reported carbon-based materials, owing to its unprecedented nitrogen doping level. The high nitrogen contents also give rise to significantly enhanced CO 2 /N 2 selectivities (up to 42), which combined with the high adsorption capacities, make these new carbon materials promising sorbents for selective CO 2 capture from power plant flue gas and other relevant applications.

Sorbent design for CO2 capture under different flue gas conditions

“…This is confirmed by the increasing number of papers published in recent years [4][5][6][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”

Solid Adsorbents for Low-Temperature CO2 Capture with Low-Energy Penalties Leading to More Effective Integrated Solutions for Power Generation and Industrial Processes

“…Following this strategy, Han et al developed porous carbon materials by using a tri-continuous mesoporous silica IBN-9 as a hard template, the resulted samples after KOH activation exhibited very high CO 2 uptakes of 19.8 and 46.3 wt. % at 1 and 8 bar, respectively (25°C) (Zhao et al, 2012a). Similar results by using other templates and carbon precursors are reported by a number of groups (Pevida et al, 2008;Li et al, 2010;Xia et al, 2011;Wang and Yang, 2012).…”

The impact of surface chemistry and texture on the CO2 uptake capacity of graphene oxide

“…The GO materials were synthesized from natural graphite powder using either the classical Hummer's method [14] (hereafter, HGO) or an improved Hummer's method [27] (hereafter, IGO). The detailed GO synthesis procedures are presented in reference [25] and in the Supporting Information.…”

“…Besides having minimal production costs, they are structurally stable in a wide range of temperatures and can be functionalized with diverse types of chemical groups. This allows one to tailor their selectivity towards specific gases such as CO 2 [14,15]. Analogously, for nanostructured carbon materials, it has been found that the presence of functional groups containing oxygen favors CO 2 uptake [16].…”