1. School of Energy Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China 2. Department of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK 3. China Datang Corporation Renewable Energy Science and Technology Research Institute, Beijing 100052, China 4. Energy and Bioproducts Research Institute (EBRI), Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
A simple method was developed to tune the porosity of coal-derived activated carbons, which provided a model adsorbent system to investigate the volumetric CO2 adsorption performance. Specifically, the method involved the variation of the activation temperature in a K2CO3 induced chemical activation process which could yield activated carbons with defined microporous (< 2 nm, including ultra-microporous < 1 nm) and meso-micro-porous structures. CO2 adsorption isotherms revealed that the microporous activated carbon has the highest measured CO2 adsorption capacity (6.0 mmol∙g–1 at 0 °C and 4.1 mmol∙g–1 at 25 °C), whilst ultra-microporous activated carbon with a high packing density exhibited the highest normalized capacity with respect to packing volume (1.8 mmol∙cm−3 at 0 °C and 1.3 mmol∙cm–3 at 25 °C), which is significant. Both experimental correlation analysis and molecular dynamics simulation demonstrated that (i) volumetric CO2 adsorption capacity is directly proportional to the ultra-micropore volume, and (ii) an increase in micropore sizes is beneficial to improve the volumetric capacity, but may lead a low CO2 adsorption density and thus low pore space utilization efficiency. The adsorption experiments on the activated carbons established the criterion for designing CO2 adsorbents with high volumetric adsorption capacity.
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