Development of facile synthesized mesoporous carbon composite adsorbent for efficient CO2 capture

Abstract

Amine-functionalized adsorbents show broad application prospects in the field of flue gas CO2 capture. However, the development of support materials with excellent CO2 capture performance and facile synthesis method is still a challenge. In this work, mesoporous carbon (MC) with the ultra large pore volume of 3.1 cm3/g is synthesized by direct carbonization of the mixture of adipic acid and zinc powder without further chemical/physical activation process. The synthesized MC was then impregnated with tetraethylenepent amine (TEPA) to prepare the adsorbent. The formed ultra large pore volume and abundant mesopores structure could promote adsorption active site dispersion, thereby improving CO2 adsorption performance. As a result, the MC support loaded with 80 wt% TEPA exhibits a large CO2 capture amount of 5.3 mmol/g at 75 ℃ with 15 vol%CO2. In addition, the carbon dioxide adsorption capacity is only 8.1 % less than that of the fresh adsorbent after 10 adsorption cycles, indicating that this adsorbent has excellent cycling stability. Noted that the synthesis of MC significantly improves the CO2 adsorption performance while simplifying the support material preparation process. Thus, it is believed that the MC material is promising adsorbent support for highly efficient CO2 capture.