Nitrogen-doped porous carbon monolith as a highly efficient catalyst for CO2 conversion

In this work, we report an N-doped porous carbon monolith used for the first time as a catalyst for the cycloaddition of CO2 to cyclic carbonates. It acts as an efficient, single-component, metal-, solvent-and halogen-free catalyst for the formation of chloropropene carbonate from CO2 and epichlorohydrin. The N-doped carbon monolith AA-950 significantly exhibited a high CO2 capture capacity of 16.20 mmol g(-1) (298 K and 20 bar) and high conversion of epoxides. A catalytic mechanism has also been proposed based on the basis of DFT calculations. Our findings may trigger interest in the studies of carbon materials for CO2 capture and conversion performance.