Tailoring biomass-based activated carbon for CH4 storage by combining chemical activation with H3PO4 or ZnCl2 and physical activation with CO2

By M. J. Prauchner, K. Sapag, F. Rodríguez-Reinoso. 2016

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Coconut shell-based activated carbons intended for CH 4 storage were prepared by chemical activation with H 3 PO 4 or ZnCl 2 and/or physical activation with CO 2 . Efforts were focused to establish relationships among the activation procedure, the textural and physical-chemical properties of the resulting materials and their volumetric CH 4 uptake. The best results were achieved by using the combination of a relatively soft chemical activation with H 3 PO 4 or ZnCl 2 , just the sufficient to minimize the presence of macropores originated from the botanical structure of the precursor, followed by physical activation with CO 2 to develop a narrow pore size distribution mainly located around the optimum pore diameter/width for CH 4 storage. This combined methodology permitted to obtain excess volumetric CH 4 adsorption capacities as high as 94, 148 and 145 V/V for granular, powdered/compressed and monolithic carbons, respectively. The corresponding total CH 4 storing capacities were estimated to be 102, 165 and 163 V/V. It is worthy to highlight that the precursor was a low cost and abundant agricultural by-product, which is very important for large-scale applications such as gas transportation and gas storage in vehicular fuel tanks.

Subfields: Environmental Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d8c662b1899f2fd7f68c70e66438e9c2ef39e77b