Synthesis, Characterization And Application Of The Carbons Prepared Using Primary Amine Hydrochloride As Template

Porous carbon materials have attracted great interest due to their potential applications in wide fields like catalysis, adsorption and energy storage. This wide-spread use of porous carbons mainly results from their remarkable properties, such as high specific surface areas, large pore volumes, electric conductivity and good mechanical stability. However, conventional methods of producing porous carbon do not offer sufficient control over porosity, which may limit their applications. Based on this, researchers have developed many methods to synthesize porous carbons with uniform pores. In 1999, ordered mesoporous carbon was first synthesized through the "hard-template approach". After that, researchers had successfully developed the "soft-template" method through organic organic self-assembly between triblock copolymer and carbon source. However, the high price of triblock copolymer may limit their large-scale applications, and it is of great importance to develop new cheap templates to prepare porous carbons.In this paper, Wormlike/lamellar microporous carbons were prepared by using long alkyl chain primary amine hydrochloride as the template and resorcinol/formaldehyde as the carbon source through hydrothermal method under highly acidic conditions. The obtained carbon materials were characterized by N2 physical adsorption, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. The results show that dodecylamine hydrochloride surfactant can be used as the template of wormlike micropores structure while octadecylamine hydrochloride results in both lamellar and wormlike micropores. The obtained carbon materials have the similar pore size of 0.5-0.59 nm, but various morphologies such as monolith, spheres, and coralline. The microporous carbon obtained from dodecylamine hydrochloride surfactant shows good adsorption performance to remove the refractory sulfur compounds and nitrogen-containing compounds in fuel. The removal rate of BT, DBT, pyridine and quinoline were 60.2%,100%,30%and 81.7%, respectively, which was better than mesoporous carbon and commercial active carbon under the same conditions.The synthesis of C1 through evaporation induced self-assemble (EISA) was also studied. The BET surface area, pore volume and pore size of C1 were 511 m2/g,0.25cm3/g, and 0.48nm, respectively, which was comparable to the carbons synthesized through hydrothermal method. However, EISA method showed poor control over the morphologies of the carbon products, only monolith carbons were obtained.