Abstract
Separation of CO2/CH4/N2 is significantly important from the view of environmental protection and energy utilization. In this work, we reported nitrogen (N)-doped porous carbon spheres prepared from sustainable biomass glucose via hydrothermal carbonization, CO2 activation, and urea treatment. The optimal carbon sample exhibited a high CO2 and CH4 capacity, as well as a low N2 uptake, under ambient conditions. The excellent selectivities toward CO2/N2, CO2/CH4, and CH4/N2 binary mixtures were predicted by ideal adsorbed solution theory (IAST) via correlating pure component adsorption isotherms with the Langmuir−Freundlich model. At 25 °C and 1 bar, the adsorption capacities for CO2 and CH4 were 3.03 and 1.3 mmol g−1, respectively, and the IAST predicated selectivities for CO2/N2 (15/85), CO2/CH4 (10/90), and CH4/N2 (30/70) reached 16.48, 7.49, and 3.76, respectively. These results should be attributed to the synergistic effect between suitable microporous structure and desirable N content. This report introduces a simple pathway to obtain N-doped porous carbon spheres to meet the flue gas and energy gas adsorptive separation requirements.
Highlights
With the rapid development of modern society, fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum are always maintaining a heavy demand
The burning of fossil fuels emits a large amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), which has led to a pressing environmental burden [1,2,3]
Soluble macromolecules polymers are first formed from the aromatization among the glucose molecules [51,52,53]
Summary
With the rapid development of modern society, fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum are always maintaining a heavy demand. One attractive aspect for porous carbon adsorbents is that they can be prepared by using various cheap carbon precursors, such as waste plastic polyethylene terephthalate [19], carbon black [24,25], coal [26,27,28], oil sands coke [29], and various biomass [30,31,32] Among these precursors, biomass materials stand out for their environmental friendliness, wide availability, low cost, and renewability, and have been extensively used as a precursor for the preparation of gas-selective adsorbents. The preparation of biomass-derived porous carbons for gas-selective adsorption usually uses the harsh activator KOH, which is undesirable due to its strong inherent causticity, causing equipment corrosion and damage [35,36]. The glucose-based hydrochar spheres were denoted as HSs
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