Abstract
The commercialization of nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbons (N-doped MCs) is highly pursued by chemical engineers. This paper focuses on the clean and simple synthesis of N-doped MCs via mechanochemistry and their applications in gas sorption. Biomass tannin as the carbon precursor together with various natural nitrogen sources was assembled with F127 by ball milling in solid-state, and then directly carbonized into N-doped MCs with tunable nitrogen contents (up to 9.7 wt%), high surface area (up to 707 m2g−1), large pore size (~8 nm), narrow pore size distribution and high pore volume (up to 0.78 cm3g−1). The CO2/N2 and C2/C3 light hydrocarbon static adsorption experiments by N-doped MCs showed a higher CO2 adsorption capacity and a better adsorption selectivity, in comparison to the control sample without nitrogen species. The IAST separation selectivity of CO2/N2 (15:85, v/v) could be about 30, meanwhile the preferred selectivity for gas molecules of alkyne was also observed.
