Herein, we investigated polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-based porous activated carbon sorbents as an efficient candidate for CO 2 capture. In this research, an easy and an economical method of chemical activation and carbonization was used to generate activated PAN precursor (PAN-C) adsorbents. The influence of various activators including NaOH, KOH, K 2 CO 3 , and KNO 3 on the textural features of PAN-C and their CO 2 adsorption performance under different temperatures was examined. Among the investigated adsorbents, PANC-NaOH and PANC-KOH exhibited high specific surface areas (2,012 and 3,072 m 2 g −1), with high microporosity (0.82 and 1.15 cm 3 g −1) and large amounts of carbon and nitrogen moieties. The PAN-C activated with NaOH and KOH showed maximum CO 2 uptakes of 257 and 246 mg g −1 at 273 K and 163 and 155 mg g −1 at 298 K, 1 bar, respectively, which was much higher as compared to the inactivated PAN-C precursor (8.9 mg g −1 at 273 K and 1 bar). The heat of adsorption (Q st) was in the range 10.81-39.26 kJ mol −1 , indicating the physisorption nature of the CO 2 adsorption process. The PAN-C-based activated adsorbents demonstrated good regeneration ability over repeated adsorption cycles. The current study offers a facile two-step fabrication method to generate efficient activated porous carbon materials from inexpensive and readily available PAN for use as CO 2 adsorbents in environmental applications.
Activated carbon (AC) was synthesized with various weight ratios of manganese dioxide (MO) through a simple hydrothermal approach. The electrochemical performance of the synthesized activated carbon/MnO2 composites was investigated. The effect of the activated carbon/MnO2 (AM) ratio on the electrochemical properties of the activated carbon/MnO2 composites and the pore structure was also examined. The results show that the specific capacitance of the activated carbon material has been improved after the addition of MO. The as-synthesized composite material exhibits specific capacitance of 60.3 F g−1 at 1 A g−1, as well as stable cycle performance and 99.6% capacitance retention over 5000 cycles.
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