Tuning porosity of coal-derived activated carbons for CO2 adsorption

Zhipeng Qie, Lijie Wang, Fei Sun, Huan Xiang, Hua Wang, Jihui Gao, Guangbo Zhao, Xiaolei Fan

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PDF(4135 KB)
Front. Chem. Sci. Eng. ›› 2022, Vol. 16 ›› Issue (9) : 1345-1354. DOI: 10.1007/s11705-022-2155-1
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Tuning porosity of coal-derived activated carbons for CO2 adsorption

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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.

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Keywords

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

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Zhipeng Qie, Lijie Wang, Fei Sun, Huan Xiang, Hua Wang, Jihui Gao, Guangbo Zhao, Xiaolei Fan. Tuning porosity of coal-derived activated carbons for CO2 adsorption. Front. Chem. Sci. Eng., 2022, 16(9): 1345‒1354 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11705-022-2155-1

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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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