Robust and Flexible Carbon Nanofibers Doped with Amine Functionalized Carbon Nanotubes for Efficient CO2 Capture

Abstract

Porous carbon nanofibrous materials have great potential for energy‐efficient CO2 capture and separations, but a major hurdle is the lack of mechanical strength and flexibility. Herein, the authors report a facile strategy for the fabrication of amine functionalized carbon nanotube (NC) doped carbon nanofibers (CNFs) (denoted as NC@CNFs) with high flexibility and hierarchical porosity. The NC@CNFs are used as robust fibrous adsorption materials for CO2 capture, which achieve superior CO2 uptake of 6.3 mmol g−1 at 1.0 bar and 298 K, as well as remarkable CO2/N2 selectivity and excellent cyclability. Integrating NC into CNFs not only brings number of adsorption sites (i.e., NH2) and tunable hierarchical pores for CO2 uptake, but also serves as single‐fiber‐crack connection to prevent NC@CNFs from brittle fracture. More significantly, the flexible NC@CNFs with highly stable structure and mechanical strength can overcome the limitation of easy pulverization and structure collapses for traditional particle‐shaped solid sorbents, which makes them highly operable and applicable. This work paves the way for a new route to produce fibrous textile materials with high flexibility and outstanding performance for gas separation.