Facile large-scale synthesis of macroscopic 3D porous graphene-like carbon nanosheets architecture for efficient CO2 adsorption

Chemisorption of CO2 by amine-based solid adsorbents is an effective approach to reduce the greenhouse effect. However, the scalable fabrication of excellent materials with superior CO2 adsorption capacity and outstanding cycle performance remains a big challenge. Here we demonstrate a unique architecture of macroscopic 3D porous graphene-like carbon nanosheets (3D-PGCNs) through a simple one-step carbonization of a mixture of melamine and natural soybean oil. The key feature of 3D-PGCNs is that the formed ultrathin graphene-like carbon nanosheets have crumpled morphology and 3D interconnected macropore structure, leading to a high pore volume (3.48 cm3 g−1) with capable of loading large amount of amine species. As a result, the 3D hybrid (3D-PEI-PGCNs) impregnated with 40 wt% polyethyleneimine (PEI) exhibits a high CO2 adsorption capacity of 117 mg g−1 at 75 °C with excellent cycling stability. This work provides a new strategy for the simple, cost-effective and scalable synthesis of efficient and stable CO2 capture sorbents.