Recently, the researchers form China University of Petroleum and and Shandong University of Technology found new discovery on the study of Carbon Ultramicropores. The related paper: A New Approach to Tuning Carbon Ultramicropore Size at Sub-Angstrom Level for Maximizing Specific Capacitance and CO2 Uptake was cover-reported by Adv. Funct. Mater. Prof. Xing Wei from Collge of Science was the first corresponding author.

Carbon materials have received considerable attention in supercapacitors and CO2 capture. in the paper. A simple ultramicropore size tuning method for carbon materials was proposed herein. The pore size can be finely tuned in the range of 0.60–0.76 nm. The pore size tuning resulted from the varying activating strength and ion sizes of the alkali metals from Li+ to Cs+. The carbon materials prepared by direct pyrolysis of alkali salts of carboxylic phenolic resins showed highly developed and uniform short length ultramicroporosity. The prepared carbon materials showed ultrahigh specific capacitances of 205 F cm−3 in ionic liquid electrolyte as a result of a perfect match in pore and ion sizes. The CsAC material showed superior CO2 adsorption capacity of 5.20 mmol g−1 at 25 °C and 1.0 bar, high CO2-to-N2selectivities and full regenerability for four consecutive cycles. This work paves the way for a new route to finely tuning ultramicropores size at the sub-angstrom level in carbon materials. It is anticipated that these intriguing carbon materials might also find applications as molecular sieves, catalysts, battery electrodes, and water/air filters.

The findings have been judged as of great novelty and broad application. The work has been supported by funds from  the national and Shandong province projects. Adv. Funct. Mater is the top journal of material science of Wiley Online Library, with  the impact factor of 2016 reaching 11.382. 

See more about the paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.201670286/full. 

Editor: Bu Lingduo

Source: UPC News Center