(519g) Design Carbon Materials on Natural Platform: Environmental Applications

Porous carbon materials are of great interest due to their wide applications in the fields of adsorption, catalysis, environmental remediation, energy storage and etc. Currently, hard- and soft- template methods are the dominating techniques to synthesize high surface area mesoporous carbons. The major disadvantage of template methods is the usage of either corrosive (hard) or toxic chemicals (soft) during synthesis, which is undesirable in industrial process. Biomass such as wood, bamboo and cotton, as a green carbon resource, has been utilized to synthesize porous carbon materials.  However, they are mostly used to provide carbon element while their structural beauty has rarely been realized in material design. Techniques to control the microstructure of bio-carbon is in urgent demand to improve materials performance. In this presentation, we will take natural wood as an example to understand its structure and design functional porous materials utilizing its unique structure feature. In this talk, two case studies on materials design will be covered and their related environmental applications will be explored: (1) Natural woodàhigh surface area mesoporous carbon in polluted water adsorption; (2) Natural woodà hierarchical mesoporous silver/Carbon nanocomposite catalysts for effective nitrophenol reduction.