Design and Study of Pillared Graphenes and Nanoporous Carbon Materials for Energy, Environmental and Catalytic Applications

Nanoporous materials have been exploited since antiquity in a plethora of applications due to their controllable pore size, diverse geometries, surface properties and their ability to interact with molecules and atoms or adsorb/release them. Being amongst the most abundant elements on earth and present in a variety of forms, carbon is an excellent candidate material for applications that can pave the way for a greener, waste-free, and less energy- and resource-demanding future and new forms of porous carbon have an important role to play in this context. Porosity in materials can be obtained in many ways; in this PhD project the focus lay on porous carbons resulting from carbonization, chemical etching, template synthesis and activation, or ‘Parthenon like’ structures. The latter were constructed through the intercalation of robust organic and/or inorganic pillars between graphene sheets in order to keep the layers apart and create interconnected void spaces with a well-defined size and chemical affinity. Towards this aim, two new composites, on where a silica network was created in the interlayer space of organically modified graphene oxide, and another one where graphene oxide was pillared with silsesquioxanes, were tested as CO2 sorbents. We also explored the ability of copper-enriched porous carbon cuboids to capture H2S gas and showed how hierarchical porous carbons with high specific surface areas and pore volumes can be produced making use of sugar and coffee wastes.