The use of porous
carbons for selective CO2 separation
attracts increasing attention. Owing to low thermostability of porous
polymers, low yield is the major concern of porous carbons. To obtain
porous carbons with high yield, the development of thermostable porous
polymers is highly expected. Herein, high yielded (70% for 700 °C
and 64% for 800 °C) Sn-doped porous carbons (SnPCs) have been
constructed through KOH-assisted carbonization of Sn-containing polymer.
Notably, SnPC-700 (218.5 mg·g–1) demonstrates
higher CO2 adsorption capacity than the reference sample
prepared without KOH, SnPC-700r (188.3 mg·g–1), indicating the importance of KOH-assisted activation. Carbonization
temperature has an effect on the adsorption capacity of resultant
materials, and high carbonization temperature leads to better adsorption
capacity on CO2. SnPC-800 is able to capture 242.8 mg·g–1 of CO2, which is better than some benchmarks
including BILP-7 (193.0 mg·g–1), PAF-1–450
(196.4 mg·g–1), and FCTF-1 (205.5 mg·g–1). More importantly, SnPC-800 demonstrates good selectivity
of CO2 over CH4 (31.1). Thus, high yield and
good performance upon CO2 adsorption capacity and selectivity
over CH4 make SnPCs attractive candidates for the removal
of CO2 from natural gas.