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Porous Carbon Adsorbent and Supercapacitor Electrode from Sustainable Biomass Resources

Chen, Long
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1491575276207998

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, Chemical Engineering.
Porous materials are of great interest due to their wide applications in the fields of adsorption, energy storage, catalyst support, etc. Most of currently used methods rely on the use of corrosive or toxic chemicals to fabricate porous materials, which pose great risk to environment and increase production cost. The work focuses on development of novel methods to convert renewable biomass resources into porous materials. Two novel methods were developed in this study. For the first method, a facile catalytic graphitization process was applied on biomass resources to produce mesoporous magnetic nanocomposite. The effect of different metal precursors and metal precursor concentration was studied. For the second method, biomass resources were converted into porous carbon by a simple two-step procedure, annealing in nitrogen and oxidation in natural air. The resulting porous carbon materials show even higher surface area than commercial activated carbon. The mechanism of pore formation was also investigated by monitoring pore evolution at different oxidation temperature and duration. It was found three different structure evolution stages are involved. Then the proposed thermal oxidation method to produce porous carbon materials was extended to other lignocellulosic biomass resources including maple, bamboo and cotton. The performance of produced porous carbon materials in adsorption and supercapacitor was evaluated. To investigate the adsorption behavior in these porous carbon materials, methylene blue was used as probing molecule. A simple model that quantifies the adsorption capacity contribution from effective surface area was proposed. The relationship among adsorption capacity, effective specific surface area and adsorbate molecular size was analyzed in both macroscale and molecular level. To further enhance electrochemical performance, nitrogen doping was attempted on porous carbon fabrics. The nitrogen doping process is achieved by simply carbonizing a mixture of porous carbon and melamine. The nitrogen content can be easily tuned by controlling the mass ratio between melamine and porous carbon. Electrochemical performance of these carbon materials with different nitrogen doping levels was investigated and compared with other reported work.
Jiahua Zhu (Advisor)
Jie Zheng (Committee Member)
Lingyun Liu (Committee Member)
Junliang Tao (Committee Member)
Sadhan Jana (Committee Member)
Chemical Engineering

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Citations

  • Chen, L. (2017). Porous Carbon Adsorbent and Supercapacitor Electrode from Sustainable Biomass Resources [Doctoral dissertation, University of Akron]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1491575276207998

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Chen, Long. Porous Carbon Adsorbent and Supercapacitor Electrode from Sustainable Biomass Resources. 2017. University of Akron, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1491575276207998.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Chen, Long. "Porous Carbon Adsorbent and Supercapacitor Electrode from Sustainable Biomass Resources." Doctoral dissertation, University of Akron, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1491575276207998

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

akron1491575276207998
187
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This open access ETD is published by University of Akron and OhioLINK.