Optimizing the Properties of Hybrids Based on Graphene Oxide for Carbon Dioxide Capture

The reduction of CO₂ emissions and its elimination from the atmosphere has become one of the major problems worldwide, since CO₂ is the main cause of the greenhouse effect and climate change. In recent years, a great number of carbonaceous materials that can be used as CO₂ adsorbents have been synthesized. The strategy is usually to synthesize the materials and determine their adsorption capacity without studying previously the factors that influence this capacity. In this work, different properties of the adsorbents are analyzed to study their influence on the CO₂ adsorption capacity. For this purpose, 10 adsorbents have been synthesized using different strategies and characterized with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and micro-Raman spectroscopy. The percentage of sp² carbons, the position of the D + D' peak of the second-order Raman spectrum, the micropore volume, and the grain size of the C sp² domains have been related to the amount of CO₂ adsorbed by the adsorbents. The results confirm a linear relationship between the volume of the micropores and the CO₂ uptake and it proves that CO₂ retention is favored in those materials that, in addition to having a high volume of micropores, also have low grain size of C.