One-pot synthesis of highly ordered nitrogen-containing mesoporous carbon with resorcinol–urea–formaldehyde resin for CO2 capture

Nitrogen-containing ordered mesoporous carbon has been prepared by a soft-templating strategy, without using intricate prepolymerization and hydrothermal solidification steps. This strategy involves the use of hexamethylenetetramine, slow releasing source of formaldehyde for the self-assembly of resorcinol–urea–formaldehyde resin, to mediate the formation of nitrogen enriched carbon organic precursor, whereas ampliphilic triblock copolymer (Pluronic F127) was used as a template. Small angle X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microcopy, nitrogen sorption demonstrated that the obtained mesoporous carbon possessed a body-centered cubic Im3‾m structure with a high surface area. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy revealed that the incorporated nitrogen was present in the form of pyridine, pyrrolyic/pyridine, quaternary and oxidized nitrogen. The presence of nitrogen groups in the resulting material significantly improved the CO2 adsorption capacity for mesoporous carbon (3.3 mmol g−1 at 0 °C, 2.6 mmol g−1 at 25 °C) and activated mesocarbon (4.9 mmol g−1 at 0 °C, 3.1 mmol g−1 at 25 °C) at 0.95 bar. This feature substantiates N-doped mesoporous carbon as a promising high-performance CO2 capture sorbent.