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Nitrogen-doped and hierarchically porous carbon derived from spent coffee ground for efficient adsorption of organic dyes

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Abstract

Here, a novel nitrogen-doped carbon nano-material (N-CGNM) with hierarchically porous structure was prepared from spent coffee ground for efficient adsorption of organic dyes by a simple one-step carbonization process (the uniform mixture consists of spent coffee ground, urea, and CaCl2 with the ratio of 1:1:1, which was heated to 1000 °C with a rate of 10 °C min−1 and held at 1000 °C for 90 min in N2 atmosphere to carry out carbonization, activation, and N-doping concurrently). The morphology and structure analysis show that the prepared N-CGNM exhibits hierarchical pore structure, high specific surface area (544 m2/g), and large numbers of positively charged nitrogen-containing groups. This unique structure and chemical composition endow N-CGNM with an excellent adsorption capacity toward anion Congo red (623.12 ± 21.69 mg/g), which is obviously superior to that (216.47 ± 18.43 mg/g) of untreated spent coffee ground-based carbon nano-materials (CGM). Oppositely, the adsorption capacity of N-CGNM towards cation methylene blue is inferior to that of CGM due to the existence of electrostatic repulsion. These findings show a great guidance for the development of low-cost but efficient selective adsorbent.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51773167, 21706208, and 51573147) and the Science and Technology Plan Project of Xi'an(2019217814GXRC014CG015-GXYD14.8).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Xi’an University of Technology, Xi’an, 710048, Shaanxi, China

    Zhong Dai, Peng-Gang Ren, Hua Zhang & Yan-Ling Jin

  2. Faculty of Printing, Packaging Engineering and Digital Media Technology, Xi’an University of Technology, Xi’an, 710048, Shaanxi, China

    Peng-Gang Ren, Xin Gao & Yan-Ling Jin

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  1. Zhong Dai
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  2. Peng-Gang Ren
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Contributions

ZD: conceptualization, methodology, writing—original draft. P-GR: resources, writing—review & editing, and supervision. HZ: software and data curation. XG: validation. Y-LJ: resources, writing—review & editing, and supervision.

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Correspondence to Peng-Gang Ren or Yan-Ling Jin.

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Dai, Z., Ren, PG., Zhang, H. et al. Nitrogen-doped and hierarchically porous carbon derived from spent coffee ground for efficient adsorption of organic dyes. Carbon Lett. 31, 1249–1260 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42823-021-00248-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42823-021-00248-z

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