A simple, sustainable route to flexible microporous carbon cloth for energy storage applications

Abstract

Activated carbon cloth (ACC) has the potential to be extremely useful in gas capture and storage applications as it combines high porosity, robustness, and flexibility with ease of handling. While it has been produced by a few researchers, the synthesis methods used to date either do not yield a product with high porosity, or if appropriate textural properties are achieved the synthesis is complex and arduous. Following a systematic study, we show that an almost exclusively microporous flexible ACC can be achieved with surface area >1900 m² g⁻¹via stabilisation with NH₄Cl only, followed by activation with benign activating agent potassium oxalate (PO). After extensive optimisation and simplification of the process, it was found that the stabilisation step can be omitted in a synthesis route requiring only a simple carbonisation step to produce a flexible microporous carbon with surface area >2200 m² g⁻¹, thus further reducing the need for additional solvents and reagents. The CO₂ and CH₄ uptake of the ACCs developed in this work is comparable to that previously reported for flexible porous carbons prepared via more complicated routes and the porosity of the ACCs can be tuned to specific gas uptake applications according to the synthesis conditions.