Valorization of lignin waste from hydrothermal treatment of biomass : towards porous carbonaceous composites for continuous hydrogenation

Alkali lignin has been accumulated as a by-product mixed with barium salts during the hydrothermal treatment of rye straw with Ba(OH)2. Direct heat treatment followed by acid washing of such mineralized lignin were performed in order to obtain a porous material that was further exploited for the synthesis of a carbonaceous supported FeNi nanoparticle composite as active catalysts for continuous hydrogenation

Carbon nanoarchitectures by design: pre-organizing squaric acid with urea

The synthesis of carbon nanoarchitectures from pre-organized precursor complexes with appropriate bonding patterns, here squaric acid and urea, is described. It is shown that depending on the precursor ratio, different crystal morphologies are formed, which can be transformed into nitrogen-containing carbons with either lamellar or hollow tubelike morphology. It is noted that despite the very different architecture, the composition of the final carbons is always close to a ‘C2N’ stoichiometry

“Cubism” on the Nanoscale: From Squaric Acid to Porous Carbon Cubes

3D cube-shaped composites and carbon microparticles with hierarchically porous structure are prepared by a facile template-free synthesis route. Via the coordination of zinc acetate dihydrate and squaric acid, porous 3D cubic crystalline particles of zinc squarate can be obtained. These are easily transformed into the respective zinc oxide carbon composites under preservation of the macromorphology by heat treatment. Washing of the composite materials results in hierarchically porous carbons with high surface areas (1295 m2 g–1) and large pore volumes (1.5 cm3 g−1) under full retention of the cube-like architecture of the initial crystals. The materials are shown to be promising electrode materials for supercapacitor applications with a specific capacitance of 133 F g−1 in H2SO4 at a scan rate of 5 mV s−1, while 67 of this specific capacitance is retained, when increasing the scan rate to 200 mV s−1