Preparation of cellulose carbon material from cow dung and its CO2 adsorption performance

With the development of large-scale animal husbandry, large amounts of manure have brought great harm to the ecological environment, thus limiting sustainable development of human and animal husbandry. Biomass carbon has been extensively studied as an adsorption material. The rational use of cow dung as biomass has important research significance for the ecological environment. However, most previous work has directly converted biomass to carbon, which limits its application due to the poor quality stability of the biomass porous carbon and large variations in performance resulting from the complexity of biomass composition and microstructure. In this work, porous carbons were prepared after pretreatment of cow dung with NaOH-urea solution to extract cellulose and activate KOH. The results showed that the materials prepared under the optimal conditions (pre-carbonization temperature of 600 °C, cellulose-to-KOH ratio of 1:1) exhibited an ultrahigh specific surface area (1345 m2/g) and micropore ratio (74.24%). The capacities for adsorption of CO2 at 273 K and 298 K and 1 bar were as high as 4.61 mmol/g and 3.26 mmol/g, respectively. This study expands the application range for cellulose and has significance for future preparation of porous carbon materials by extracting cellulose from biomass.