Preparation of carbon adsorbents with high surface area and a model for calculating surface area Original Research Article

Carbon adsorbents (CAs) were made by heat treatment of a mixture of coal char and KOH under the protection of an inert argon flow and the influence of operating conditions on the properties of adsorbents was investigated. Changes in the characteristics of graphitic crystallites during manufacture by X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis indicated that disappearance of the peak corresponding to 002 faces correlated to high specific surface area. Based on the experimental results, a new model of graphitic crystallites containing hydrogen atoms is proposed to calculate idealized surface area of CAs. With this model, the idealized surface areas of CA can be precisely calculated with the aid of X-ray diffraction. In this way, some experimental problems can be overcome, such as the difficulty to measure specific surface area with N2 adsorption when pore diameters are too small and overestimation when surface areas are too large.