Study on Sorption Performance of Carbon Dioxide and Toluene by the Biomass-Based Porous Carbon

We studied the sorption performance of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and toluene by the biomass-based porous carbon (the activated porous carbon derived from liquefied bark-phenol formaldehyde resins and nori-based porous carbon). Due to their much more developed porosity, the bark-PF based porous carbons (BRC) showed much higher sorption capacities of CO₂ and toluene. At 100 kPa, BRC-3 exhibited the highest CO₂ sorption capacities, up to 7.23 and 4.45 mol·g^–1 at 0 °C and 25 °C, respectively. Comparatively, the nori-based porous materials gived better CO₂ sorption performance at low pressure. The CO₂ sorption capacity of Nori-ZnCl₂ -2:1-700 is 0.97 mol·g^–1 at 25 °C under 15 kPa. BRC-3, the materials with the highest pore volume, showed the highest toluene sorption capacity of 145 mg·g^–1. All the results indicated that the effective pore channels are different for CO₂ or toluene because of the difference in molecular diameters. For the smaller CO₂ molecular, the micropores smaller than 1 nm, especially the extremely smaller than 0.7 nm, are most effective. However, for the much larger toluene molecular, the big micropores and small sized mesopores are effective.