Synthesis of a nitrogen-doped porous carbon monolith and its use for CO2 capture

Monolithic nitrogen-doped porous carbon was synthesized by the copolymerization of resorcinol and formaldehyde in the presence of l-lysine as the catalyst at the ambient conditions. The carbon is designated RFL. In order to increase the active nitrogen content, nitrogen-rich melamine was added, and the resulting material (RFLM) has more nitrogen-containing functional groups, and a higher specific surface area and pore volume than the original RFL. Glutamic acid was used to control the rate of polymerization, resulting in a porous carbon (RFLMG) with optimized texture properties. However, samples of RFLM and RFLMG show lower CO2 adsorption capacities than do the RFL series, indicating that there is no explicit linear relationship between the nitrogen content and CO2 adsorption capacity. This may be directly caused by the different form of the nitrogen-containing functional groups.[New Carbon Materials 2013, 28(4): 267–272]