Porous carbons are attractive for many applications such as gas storage, portable electronic devices, water filtration and gas/air purification due to their highly porous texture and high surface area. As for gas separation application, the microporous structure is generally preferred are in order to increase the surface area for enhanced gas storage capacity. One of the processes that can generate the porosity in porous carbons is the activation process which can be divided into two methods, physical activation and chemical activation. In this work polybenzoxazine (PBZ), a novel class of thermosetting phenolic resin, was chosen as an organic precursor to prepare nanoporous carbon materials used as a gas adsorption due to its many advantages such as high thermal stability, high char yield, near zero-shrinkage upon polymerization. It was found that when using tetraethylenepentamine (TEPA) and activated by physical activation under CO2 at 900°C for 3 hours, the surface area of the resulting nanoporous carbon was 838 m2/g with the total pore volume of 0.46 cm2/g and the micropore volume of 0.42 cm2/g meaning that this nanoporous carbon showed the pore size in a range of microporous materials. For the gas absorption measurement, the porous carbon showed the methane uptake of 25 mmol/g at pressure of 700 psi. In addition, the adsorption was measured with increasing pressure which might be due to the interconnected pore in the PBZ-based nanoporous carbon derived from TEPA.

Designing nanoporous carbon as adsorbents for CH4 storage

255th National Meeting (2018)

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