Mesoporous carbons have been widely explored over the past few decades due to their high surface area, excellent physicochemical properties and availability of various synthetic strategies, in applications such as electrode materials, catalyst supports as well as sorbents of gases, metal ions, and organic molecules. Incorporation of heteroatom dopants (e.g., N, F, S, B, P) in the sp2 framework has been demonstrated to improve the properties of various graphitic carbons. Among them, nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbons are of the most widely investigated due to their superior performance in electrochemical devices, catalysis or CO<sub>2</sub> adsorption. In this work, a copolymer-templating method was employed for the facile preparation of nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbons for adsorption toward heavy metal ions. The nitrogen-containing copolymer templates were synthesized by atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP), followed by carbonization at different temperatures to obtain nitrogen-doped nanocarbons with different composition and porosity. Due to the presence of a large number of nitrogen sites, the mesoporous carbons showed favorable adsorption ability to heavy metal ions such as hexavalent chromium and uranium. The synthetic procedure was detailed in this work, and the impact of both porosity and nitrogen contents were systematically studied.

Heavy metal ions adsorption by nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbons synthesized using a copolymer-templating method

256th National Meeting (2018)

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