Nitrogen-rich melamine cyanurate derived hollow porous carbon microspheres prepared through CuCl2 activation for VOCs adsorption

Nitrogen-enriched porous carbon material with large specific surface area is of great demand in various applications. Herein, CuCl2 is adapted as a mild activator to transform the mixture of soybean meal and melamine cyanurate into a novel type of nitrogen-enriched hollow porous carbon microspheres with well-defined hierarchically structure. Excitingly, this mild activation agent not only helps generating porous structure, but also helps increasing the nitrogen content (mainly pyrrolic-N) of products. The product NPC-800-4 exhibits the highest specific surface area (1672.45 m(2) g(-1)) while a pretty high nitrogen content (13.09 at%). The NPC-800-4 sample performs the largest toluene and acetone adsorption capacity (818.46 mg g(-1) and 758.87 mg g(-1) respectively). Furthermore, Grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) and density functional theory (DFT) calculations prove that the introduction of nitrogen functional groups can heighten the polarity of carbon framework and the electrostatic interaction, thus enhance the acetone adsorption capacity.

Automated summary

In this study, CuCl2 was used as a mild activator to prepare nitrogen-enriched hollow porous carbon microspheres from a mixture of soybean meal and melamine cyanurate. The resulting material showed high specific surface area and nitrogen content, with excellent adsorption capacity for toluene and acetone.