Nitrogen-Doped Porous Carbon Materials Derived from Graphene Oxide/Melamine Resin Composites for CO₂ Adsorption

CO2 adsorption in porous carbon materials has attracted great interests for alleviating emission of post-combustion CO2. In this work, a novel nitrogen-doped porous carbon material was fabricated by carbonizing the precursor of melamine-resorcinol-formaldehyde resin/graphene oxide (MR/GO) composites with KOH as the activation agent. Detailed characterization results revealed that the fabricated MR(0.25)/GO-500 porous carbon (0.25 represented the amount of GO added in wt.% and 500 denoted activation temperature in °C) had well-defined pore size distribution, high specific surface area (1264 m2·g−1) and high nitrogen content (6.92 wt.%), which was mainly composed of the pyridinic-N and pyrrolic-N species. Batch adsorption experiments demonstrated that the fabricated MR(0.25)/GO-500 porous carbon delivered excellent CO2 adsorption ability of 5.21 mmol·g−1 at 298.15 K and 500 kPa, and such porous carbon also exhibited fast adsorption kinetics, high selectivity of CO2/N2 and good recyclability. With the inherent microstructure features of high surface area and abundant N adsorption sites species, the MR/GO-derived porous carbon materials offer a potentially promising adsorbent for practical CO2 capture