Facile synthesis of magnetic hierarchical porous carbon and the adsorption properties

Abstract

In this work, hierarchical porous carbon materials with meso-macro porous were simply synthesized by only adding FeCl2 to the phenolic resin (PF). Here, macro porous was achieved by changing the polymerization kinetics of the resin-ethylene glycol mixture during curing through FeCl2, thus a tunable average pore size distribution from 50 nm to 190 nm obtained. In addition, iron can catalyze the carbon-water gasification reaction during the carbonization process, resulting in a mesoporous structure of about 3.5 nm. Besides, the prepared porous carbon material with a metal ion content of 2% was applied to remove organic pollutants in wastewater, which the adsorption capacity for methylene orange (MO) can reach to 175.91 mg g−1. Meanwhile, the porous carbon can be separated and recovered from the suspension simply by magnetic force, and its saturation magnetization was 10.8 emu g−1. Overall, the prepared porous carbon materials have good adsorption properties, and can be used as an optional candidate for magnetic separation super sorbent designed to remove MO or even other dyes in wastewater.