The fabrication of porous N-doped carbon from widely available urea formaldehyde resin for carbon dioxide adsorption

•A graphitic-like porous N-doped carbon material is fabricated from low cost and wide available urea formaldehyde resin.•CO2 adsorption capacity of as-synthesized material is tested, which high capacity of 3.21 mmol g−1 at 25 °C is obtained.•Various characterizations reveal that both the pore size and basic N species played a crucial role in CO2 capture capacity.

N-doped carbon material constitutes abundant of micropores and basic nitrogen species that have potential implementation for CO2 capture. In this paper, porous carbon material with high nitrogen content was simply fabricated by carbonizing low cost and widely available urea formaldehyde resin, and then followed by KOH activation. CO2 capture experiment showed high adsorption capacity of 3.21 mmol g−1 at 25 °C under 1 atm for UFCA-2-600. XRD, SEM, XPS and FT-IR analysis confirmed that a graphitic-like structure was retained even after high temperature carbonization and strong base activation. Textural property analysis revealed that narrow micropores, especially below 0.8 nm, were effective for CO2 adsorption by physical adsorption mechanism. Chemical evolved investigation revealed that graphitic-like embedded basic nitrogen groups are generated from bridged and terminal amines of urea formaldehyde resin from thermal carbonization and KOH activation treatment, which is responsible for the enrichment of CO2 capacity by chemical adsorption mechanism. The relationship between CO2 adsorption capacity and pore size or basic N species was also studied, which turned out that both of them played crucial role by physical and chemical adsorption mechanism, respectively.

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