Abstract
Synthesis of multiphase materials from lignin, a biorefinery coproduct, offers limited success owing to the inherent difficulty in controlling dispersion of these renewable hyperbranched macromolecules in the product or its intermediates. Effective use of the chemically reactive functionalities in lignin, however, enables tuning morphologies of the materials. Here, we bind lignin oligomers with a rubbery macromolecule followed by thermal crosslinking to form a carbon precursor with phase contrasted morphology at submicron scale. The solvent-free mixing is conducted in a high-shear melt mixer. With this, the carbon precursor is further modified with potassium hydroxide for a single-step carbonization to yield activated carbon with tunable pore structure. A typical precursor with 90 % lignin yields porous carbon with 2120 m2 g−1 surface area and supercapacitor with 215 F g−1 capacitance. The results show a simple route towards manufacturing carbon-based energy-storage materials, eliminating the need for conventional template synthesis.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2953-2959 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | ChemSusChem |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue number | 17 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 11 2018 |
Funding
This research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725, was sponsored by the DOE Advance Manufacturing Office. The lignin sample was supplied by Glucan Biorenewables, LLC. We thank Dr. Yunchao Li from The University of Tennessee for helping with the electrode testing and Dr. Francisco Sotomayor from Quantachrome Instruments for the continuous support with the gas adsorption desorption experiments. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| DOE Advance Manufacturing Office | |
| US Department of Energy | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| Battelle | |
| Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory |
Keywords
- carbon
- lignin crosslinking
- morphology tuning
- renewable resources
- supercapacitor
