Abstract
Porous boron nitride (BN) is structurally analogous to activated carbon. This material is gaining increasing attention for its potential in a range of adsorption and chemical separation applications, with a number of recent proof-of-concept studies on the removal of organics from water. Today though, the properties of porous BN—i.e., surface area, pore network, chemistry—that dictate adsorption of specific organics remain vastly unknown. Yet, they will need to be optimized to realize the full potential of the material in the envisioned applications. Here, a selection of porous BN materials with varied pore structures and chemistries were studied for the adsorption of different organic molecules, either directly, through vapor sorption analyses or as part of a water/organic mixture in the liquid phase. These separations are relevant to the industrial and environmental sectors and are envisioned to take advantage of the hydrophobic character of the BN sheets. The materials were tested and regenerated and their physical and chemical features were characterized before and after testing. This study allowed identifying the adsorption mechanisms, assessing the performance of porous BN compared to benchmarks in the field and outlining ways to improve the adsorption performance further.
Highlights
Chemical separations account for more than half of the total energy consumed in industry owing to the many separation processes performed via distillation (Sholl and Lively, 2016)
After demonstrating that the porosity of the high temperature boron nitride (BN) samples was maintained upon adsorption testing and regeneration, we investigated any potential changes in the chemistry of the materials using X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) analyses
We presented here a study on the adsorption behavior of porous boron nitride
Summary
Chemical separations account for more than half of the total energy consumed in industry owing to the many separation processes performed via distillation (Sholl and Lively, 2016). We evaluated water sorption for different low temperature porous BN samples at 30 ◦C (Figure 1C). The high temperature porous BN showed a reduced water uptake capacity, especially at low relative pressures (Figure 1C).
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