Sugar Derived Nanoporous Carbon Material for CO₂ Direct Air Capture

The mitigation of the impact of anthropogenic carbon dioxide is important to the reversal of the trend of the climate change that has been already observed in the world. One of the key approaches for solving this problem is to capture carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere in advance of fixation, conversion, or injection into the aquifers for long-term storage. Successful CO₂ capture is further complicated by the fact that nitrogen (N₂) is the dominant gas in the Earth’s atmosphere. Thus the separation of carbon dioxide from the mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen gases requires economic and environmentally friendly technologies is vital to enable anthropogenic intervention to the reverse of the current trend of climate change.<br/><br/>Current state-of-the-art CO₂ capture technologies involve amine-based chemical sorption in corrosive KOH solution. It is an energy intensive process to regenerate the absorbent. In this work, we synthesized nanoporous carbon material using sugar as precursor to adsorb CO₂ via a physical sorption process to achieve the separation of CO₂ from N₂. We have successfully synthesized both mesoporous and microporous carbon materials utilizing the common table sugar sucrose (C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁) as the carbon precursor material. Addition of polystyrene-block-poly(4-vinylpyridine) (PS-P4VP) or n-Dodecyl beta-D-maltoside (DDM) (C₂₄H₄₆O₁₁) serve as the sugar surfactant and also enhance product porosity. The mesopores synthesized using PS-P4VP are mostly between ~10 nm and ~40 nm. The micropores synthesized using DDM are between 1 – 2 nm. Ongoing work includes characterization of the separation of CO₂ from the mixture of CO₂ + N₂ with the newly synthesized nanoporous carbon materials using mass spectrometry to investigate the relationship between CO₂ separation efficiency and pore size.<br/><br/>The synthesis technology developed will have an important impact in mitigating the negative effect of anthropogenic CO₂ on the climate change. Since the precursor materials for producing the nanoporous materials are cost-effective, abundant, and widely available, and the methods developed in this work for generating the nanoporous materials are environmentally friendly and are sustainable.<br/><br/><i>SNL is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525</i>.<br/><i>SAND2022-8198 A</i>