Tuning porosity of coal-derived activated carbons for CO₂ adsorption

Abstract

A simple method was developed to tune the porosity of coal-derived activated carbons, which provided a model adsorbent system to investigate the volumetric CO₂ adsorption performance. Specifically, the method involved the variation of the activation temperature in a K₂CO₃ induced chemical activation process which could yield activated carbons with defined microporous (< 2 nm, including ultra-microporous < 1 nm) and meso-micro-porous structures. CO₂ adsorption isotherms revealed that the microporous activated carbon has the highest measured CO₂ adsorption capacity (6.0 mmol∙g^–1 at 0 °C and 4.1 mmol∙g^–1 at 25 °C), whilst ultra-microporous activated carbon with a high packing density exhibited the highest normalized capacity with respect to packing volume (1.8 mmol∙cm⁻³ at 0 °C and 1.3 mmol∙cm^–3 at 25 °C), which is significant. Both experimental correlation analysis and molecular dynamics simulation demonstrated that (i) volumetric CO₂ adsorption capacity is directly proportional to the ultra-micropore volume, and (ii) an increase in micropore sizes is beneficial to improve the volumetric capacity, but may lead a low CO₂ adsorption density and thus low pore space utilization efficiency. The adsorption experiments on the activated carbons established the criterion for designing CO₂ adsorbents with high volumetric adsorption capacity.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

coal-derived activated carbons / porosity / CO₂ adsorption / molecular dynamics

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51806050) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of Harbin Institute of Technology. The authors also acknowledge the financial support from the Taif Researchers Supporting Project (Grant No. TURSP-2020/162) by the Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11705-022-2155-1 and is accessible for authorized users.

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