Carbon materials are highly active catalysts for biomass conversion such as hydrolysis of cellulose. For heterogeneous catalysis, adsorption of substrates on catalysts is an essential step to accelerate reactions, and this step should be crucial for the high performances of carbon catalysts. In this work, we studied adsorption of cellulosic molecules on carbons by thermodynamics and computations to reveal the driving force. The adsorption is caused by hydrophobic groups of carbons and cellulosic molecules but does not correlate with the contents of their hydrophilic groups. The negative enthalpy changes and positive entropy changes are observed for the adsorptions of all cellulosic molecules tested.  These results indicate that hydrophobic interaction and CH-p hydrogen bonding dominantly drive the adsorption. The formation of CH-p hydrogen bonding was also confirmed by DFT calculations.  Additionally, the adsorption of cellulosic molecules on carbons occurs more easily than that on cellulose. Accordingly, it is thermodynamically possible that carbons peel off a cellulosic chain from cellulose.

Adsorption of cellulosic molecules on carbon materials driven by their hydrophobicity

248th National Meeting (2014)

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