Pine pollen derived porous carbon with efficient capacitive deionization performance

Abstract

Abstract Capacitive deionization (CDI) is a powerful brackish water desalination technology and one of the effective measures to solve the shortage of freshwater resources. With the hope to design a material with efficient desalination performance, we develop a simple, fast and green method to prepare porous carbon. The pine pollen disruption powder is used as the carbon precursor to prepare porous carbon by a simple high temperature calcination. We explore the effect of temperature on the morphology, pores and electrosorption performance, discovering the material calcined at 900\u202f°C (PC-900) is the optimal one. PC-900 exhibits the electrosorption capacity of 7.25\u202fmg\u202fg−1 at a low initial concentration of NaCl (50.5\u202fμS\u202fcm−1) and 19.43\u202fmg\u202fg−1 at a high initial concentration of NaCl (500\u202fμS\u202fcm−1). Moreover, the synthesized material also shows improved exhibited salt removal rate, charge efficiency, reversibility and recycling stability. The excellent desalination performance is mainly attributed to the large specific surface area and suitable pore size. This result demonstrates that is porous carbon derived from pine pollen disruption powder is a promising CDI electrode material for brackish water desalination.