HETEROATOMS ENRICHED POLYMERIC AND NANOPOROUS CARBONACEOUS MATERIALS FOR ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL APPLICATIONS

Abstract

The evolution of polymeric materials has made a paradigm shift in the requirement of materials for various functions. Very recently, the strategy to incorporate the heteroatoms in the polymeric and carbon frameworks that significantly improve the properties and applications due to the controlled functionality, which gained a lot of interest. The severe and consistent increase of toxic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to the aggressive burning of fossil fuels are the major cause for global warming. The excessive burning of fossil fuel can be reduced by using renewable energy sources , by storing the energy, so for this purpose, supercapacitor is one the best and promising candidate, which has high power density and long-life cycles without any degradation with no short circuit issues compared to common capacitors, battery, and store charge by non-faradically, faradically or both. The clean energy generation is another way to reduce global warming which can be fulfill by the fuel cell, among all fuel cell hydrazine is best because it is carbon free and its by products are H2, H2O and N2. Further, to circumvent the problem of rising CO2 level into atmosphere due to anthropogenic activities, the adsorption using high surface area solid adsorbents is efficient and more feasible. In the present research, the electrode and adsorbent materials have been synthesized utilizing precursors that could form material with heteroatoms enrichment. The metal free heteroatom (N and P) enriched material is used as energy storage in the field of supercapacitor by optimizing active mass loading of material through systematic investigations to have the best outcome for the supercapacitor device fabrication. Although the synthesized material has low surface area of 16 m2 g-1 but it still shows capacitance of 243 F g-1 at optimized mass and the fabricated device with optimum mass loading could lit 23 LEDs for 50 sec. just on charging f or 5 sec. at 3 V. Further, the metal free porous carbon is synthesized from nonporous sample which is enriched with redox active sites and explored as electrocatalyst for hydrazine oxidation reaction (HzOR) which shows low onset potential of 0.25 V vs R.H.E. with current density of 96.4 mA cm- 2 and minimum Tafel slope of 14 mV dec-1 with particularly good stability of electrocatalyst for 12 h and this heteroatom enriched carbon shows enhancement in specific surface area from 16 m2 g-1 to 1634 m2 g-1. Also, this porous carbon can capture 5.6 mmol g-1 of CO2, 3 mmol g-1 of CH4 at 273 K and 11.95 mmol g-1 of H2 at 77 K at 1 bar and can store charge of 524 F g-1 at optimized weight with 94% of retention which is among the best heteroatom enriched porous carbon absorbents and electrode material.