Carbon capture using amine modified porous carbons derived from starch (Starbons

Adsorption based carbon capture to address the serious concern of global warming has been gaining worldwide attention of researchers due to its inherent advantages vis a vis other technical options like absorption, membrane and cryogenic separations, chemical looping combustion etc. Porous carbons from biomass wastes are under focus currently owing to its abundance, simple synthesis and regeneration and flexibility to achieve the desired pore structure and chemical modification. Carbon capture studies using porous carbons from starch have received little attention when compared to other biomass precursors. Hence in this work, facile synthesis of porous carbons from corn and potato starch has been employed. These were then screened w.r.t physico-chemical properties using different analytical tools like XRD, FTIR and BET surface area. Amine loading was done by wet impregnation method at different levels from 10 to 30% by wt to enhance their CC performance. Process standardization was done to maximize the CC capacity w.r.t critical process parameters like carbonation time, temperature, loading level, biomass precursor etc. A reasonably good CC of 3.4 mmol/g has been achieved at the optimal conditions. Cyclic stability and regenerability studies were also conducted to assess their stability and long term deployment potential. Amine loading was found to have a positive influence in achieving higher CC but at the cost of cyclic stability. From our studies, we could state that Starbons® have a great potential to act as green sorbent in CC and the technology is in nascent stage, there is a huge window for innovation in synthesis, structure and chemical modification.