Porous Fluorocarbon from Rice Husk for the Efficient Separation of Gases.

A porous fluorocarbon sorbent is synthesized from rice husk (RH) in a microwave reactor and then evaluated for the adsorption of different gases (CH4, CO2, and N2). The fluorocarbon is characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), Raman spectroscopy, Thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Significant enhancement in the surface area of activated carbon material is obtained from 29 to 531 m2 g-1 after removing naturally present silica in RH. Results reveal that rice husk fluorocarbon (RHF) has a higher adsorption affinity for CO2 (1.8 mmol g-1) than that of the sulfonated rice husk (RHS) (1.4 mmol g-1) at 298 K while the corresponding separation factor of CO2/CH4 is 4 and 3; respectively. Higher separation factors of 12 and 10 are observed for the binary system of CO2/N2, respectively. Quantum chemical density functional theory (DFT) calculations agree with the experimental observations. They reveal that RHF exhibits strong columbic interactions with considerable interaction energies of -87.85, -76.75, and -55.65 kcal mol-1 with CO2, CH4, and N2 gases; respectively. Finally, the adsorption process results are highly reproducible, with a small decrease in the adsorption capacity of less than 5% after repeated trials.

Rice husk derived Aminated Silica for the efficient adsorption of different gases.

In this present work, we successfully prepared aminated silica (ASiO2) from rice husk ash (RHA) and functionalized with 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES). Physical and chemical properties of the synthesized material were investigated by various techniques SEM-EDX, XPS, FTIR, TGA. The surface area of RHA was 223 m2/g, while for ASiO2 was 101 m2/g. Molecular level DFT calculations revealed that the functionalization of ASiO2 resulted in a significant decrease in the HOMO-LUMO energy gap, a reduction in hardness, and a consequent increase in charge transfer characteristics. The adsorption behavior at low pressure (1 atm.) of aminated silica on different gases CO2, CH4, H2, and N2 at temperatures 77, 273, 298 K was studied. The adsorption of hydrogen was reported for the first time on aminated silica with an excellent adsorption capacity of 1.2 mmol/g. The ASiO2 exhibited excellent performance in terms of gas separation in binary mixtures of CO2/CH4, CO2/N2 and CO2/H2 at 273, and 298 K, respectively. The catalyst further exhibits high stability during three cycles with less than 10% variation in the separation capacity.